Namics grows in St. Gallen

The new office building will have 3,300 square meters of work space and provide 250 employees with a workplace. The construction project is being financed and implemented by the joint pension fund ASGA Pensionskasse Genossenschaft. As part of the collaboration with ASGA, Namics has agreed to lease the entire building for at least 15 years. The building is scheduled for completion at the beginning of 2017.

In the long term, Namics plans to grow, as the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Partner at Namics, Roland Schönholzer, confirms: "Namics continues to grow - in Switzerland too. Together with ASGA, we are therefore creating an office building that offers our employees many advantages: On the one hand, they no longer have to communicate via offices scattered around the city. On the other hand, colleagues will benefit from the proximity to the main railway station and modern workplaces. With the ground-breaking ceremony, we are taking a big step towards the future in our 20th anniversary year."

Promotion of St. Gallen as an ICT location

With this strategic decision, the e-business specialist not only wants to strengthen its position as a long-term employer in the region. With the ground-breaking ceremony to mark its 20th anniversary, the web service provider is also strengthening the founding location of St. Gallen. "Namics is a very future-oriented company that creates service jobs," confirms Isabel Schorer, Head of Location Promotion St. Gallen. She is convinced that Namics is the ideal partner to have on board: "St. Gallen is one of the largest ICT locations in Switzerland. It is therefore important for us to better position this location. Namics contributes a lot here as a company, but also as an employer, as the company is a very modern and attractive employer in the ICT environment."

To this end, the company has been supporting the "IT St. Gallen rocks" project for some time. A year ago, 26 IT companies got together with the St. Gallen location promotion agency and decided to promote the attractiveness of St. Gallen as a place to work and live. Under the claim "IT St. Gallen rocks", Namics developed a comprehensive concept for an image campaign at the end of 2013, which was implemented over the course of last year with a dedicated website and several waves of Poster campaigns was implemented. This initiative kicked off on November 27, 2013 with a concert by industrial legends "The Young Gods" in the Lokremise St. Gallen in front of over 750 visitors, most of them from the IT sector.

However, the web service provider is also involved in the education sector, and for good reason, according to Schorer: "The training and further education on offer must be tailored precisely to what companies actually need. In order to be able to cover the increasing demand for employees in the long term, Namics developed the HF Communication Designer course with a specialization in Interactive Media Design together with the St. Gallen University of Applied Sciences. The concept for the new course was developed by Jana Nobel, Creative Director at Namics. This course has just started in August with the first apprentices. (Read more: Interview with Jana Nobel in the next Print edition from Friday, October 2, 2015)

New location as a reflection of culture

Namics initiated an architectural competition for the new building at Unterstrasse 12 in 2013. ARGE Menn Amann came out on top from a total of six participating offices. The design represents the culture of the full-service web service provider, which has been in existence since 1995, and impressed the jury with its open and flexible spatial structure. The Namics "think tank" enables and promotes interactive collaboration through generously dimensioned meeting and exchange areas. (uma)