We recently moved into our newly redesigned offices and in the process managed to strike an interesting balance. Our goal was to embrace our growth from a basement start-up to a proper business with real revenue and an employee manual while still preserving what we think is special about our culture: excitement and out-of-the-box thinking. Here’s what we did. In the beginning, TerraCycle had a funky office environment because that was all we could afford. The walls were always painted in various bright colors — typically with rejected color mixes from local paint stores — and they were always covered with various art pieces we could find free, such as paintings from the local high school art department and various objects people thought fit to throw out. I was inspired to create such a space by Jim Budman, founder of Budman Studio. The concept behind Jim’s vision is to facilitate art and create an ever-changing and highly stimulating environment for creative thought. When I went to Princeton, I started spending weekends at his SoHo studio to escape our Milwaukee’s Best-drenched parties (this New York Times article from 2001 captures what those weekends were like.)