UpWork (In-house)

Every January Upwork gathers its thousands of employees from all around the world for a virtual event to get everybody jazzed up for the coming year. It’s called “Kick-Off” and internally it’s a big deal. The C-Suite gives speeches, they host a big name guest speaker, announce the year’s north star, company goals, and all of the plans from the master spreadsheet.

To keep this big corporate event from feeling like a big corporate event, they turned to us to create a thematic, creative wrapper and put on a a show. One that would appeal to employees from San Francisco to Mumbai to Manilla, showcase our company values and announce what was in store for 2024.

We created The Upwork Values Store - an immersive, global, digital mini mart experience that gathered our audience under the universal roof of the corner store – bodega cat and all.

We pulled the bodega theme through every touchpoint, from merch to speaker design to a bespoke in-store radio station: WUPWork for the intermission entertainment. Is that Drake on track 1?!

The brief: Inspired by our four company values (and eight working principles) create a theme for our annual January kickoff, packaging a live, digital day of leadership and guest speakers to gear up a global remote first company for 2024. 

The idea: If there is one universally understood concept, it’s the bodega, the convenience store or the ‘sari-sari’ if you’re Filipino. How do you make corporate buzz words entertaining? A value(s) store, of course - a digital mini-mart to shop top shelf company values.

The budget: $000.00 We wanted the experience to reflect the power of the brand. So we partnered with talent straight from the Upwork platform.

Hear the full run of entertainment below, including a cameo by AI Drake.

We built in in two, ten-minute long entertainment breaks. What’s playing on the in-store radio? WUPWork FM, a morning radio drive we created for the world of Upwork. I wrote and produced weather, traffic, and news reports for our DJ and her Sidekick. Finally we programmed a run of bespoke global bop and an a Drake and Shakira banger. AI voiced with handmade lyrics by me.

That’s Snacks, the bodega cat.