A Field Note on the messy middle of repositioning ko&co and making the centre of gravity visible.
There is a strange thing that happens when the most visible part of your business becomes the thing people understand, remember, and repeat back to you. It makes sense, of course. As humans, we like tangible things. We like rooms, doors, desks, coffee cups, photos, events, and things they can point to and say, “That’s what you do.”
For a while, ko&co had all those things.
A room. A workhub. Conversations at the kitchen bench. Events. Coffee. Founders building brands near other founders. A front door, which is incredibly helpful when you are trying to explain a business.
I am proud of that chapter. Coworking was not a mistake, a detour, or something I am quietly shuffling into the brand cupboard while pretending it never happened. It was real. It mattered. It created connection, momentum, community, and a sense of belonging for small business owners, helping them feel less alone in what they were building.
But it was also the visible part. And visible things have a habit of becoming the whole story. Which is fine, until it is not.
Recently, circumstances required me to pack up the physical infrastructure of the coworking side of ko&co.
When the physical ground shifts beneath a business, the default reaction is often to scramble for certainty. To recreate the thing people already understood. To rebuild the visible part as quickly as possible, because sitting with the uncomfortable is much harder.
But standing among packed boxes, decisions, admin, too many emotions, and the distinct exhaustion that comes from dismantling something I had built with care, I had to be honest with myself.
The walls mattered. They held a real chapter of the business. But they were never the whole point.
The centre of gravity.
Sometimes repositioning a business is not about becoming something entirely new. It is simply about making your real centre of gravity visible.
That sounds clean and strategic when written in one sentence. In real life, it is a lot messier. It is less a graceful “brand evolution” and more a case of questioning how the business model needed to move forward while trying to remember which box holds the HDMI cables.
Repositioning is not something you should do at midnight because you can’t sleep and have suddenly decided to hate your website. It is not a furious logo change, nor is it throwing everything out because a single part of the business becomes difficult. It is strategic work, even when it feels deeply personal. And if you are the founder, it always is.
The coworking chapter gave ko&co a beautiful physical expression. It was a real business layer, a community, and a commercial model. It was also an expression of a deeper strategic and creative practice.
The intangible work, the strategy, the design, the positioning, and the communication that shaped that environment are much harder to see. It happens in the background before the obvious appears. For a long time, the walls of the workhub were the easiest part of ko&co to understand, when it was actually the strategic branding underneath that was doing the heavy lifting.
The building did not make ko&co good at branding. The branding made the building feel like ko&co.
That distinction has become clearer through this transition. The building mattered, but it was never the whole of ko&co. It was part of the brand expression, not the full centre of gravity.
Realigning, not starting again.
This is the part I keep coming back to. Repositioning does not always mean becoming something completely new. Sometimes it means the business has grown, shifted, or clarified, but the brand is still carrying an older version of the story.
Sometimes it means the most visible part of the business has become too dominant, while the deeper value sits quietly in the background, doing the actual work and wondering when it might be invited to the front.
“Starting again” can feel dramatic and wasteful. It can make you question whether the old version was wrong, or whether you should now be banned from making decisions without adult supervision. Realigning is different. Realigning says: there was truth in what came before, but the business has moved, and the brand needs to catch up.
Before ko&co had a room, I was already doing the work that now sits at the centre of the business: brand strategy, design, marketing, visual communication, facilitation, and partnerships. Across industries and rooms, the recurring tension is the same: people need their business to make sense.
They need to know what they stand for, what they are trying to say, who they are speaking to, why it matters, and how all of that should show up in words, visuals, design, and everyday decisions. The deeper work is ensuring the business has enough structure, clarity, and truth to hold everything else up. It is making sure the inside matches the outside.
For a long time, I did that work while also managing rooms, coffee machines, capacity, events, and the not-so-glamorous logistics of running a physical space.
Now that the physical layer has had to step back, the strategy remains.
The landing
So, what does this mean for ko&co?
It means ko&co is bringing its engine to the forefront: strategic branding + visual design.
We are still here for small businesses, brand-led founders, and teams who want to build something that matters. We are just doing it through brand architecture instead of floor plans. Through positioning instead of hot desks. Through visual identity, communication strategy, and creative direction, we help small businesses make sense to the world.
With the physical coworking chapter no longer operating from Buckhurst Street, our centre of gravity is easier to see.
Welcome to the front door of ko&co.
