Home office decoration and branding on a tight budget

Published on Oct 29, 2012

Home offices and co-working spaces are growing in numbers. To me, it comes as no surprise that large corporations are losing workers to the freelancing and startup lifestyle. More and more people realize that there's only one life to live. Yes, that includes a professional life as well. You have one career ahead of you and you better make it into something you really enjoy doing. Otherwise, why do it? With freelancing comes the responsibility of marketing yourself.

Traditionally that includes printing business card and setting up a cool portfolio website. Okay, we should also be on Twitter, Facebook and maybe even Google Plus, but we're doing that anyway aren't we? There's always the question of how we can market ourselves in a classy, yet preferably cost-effective way. Here's what I did yesterday. Together with a friend who owns a polystyrene cutter (it's a large machine that can cut polystyrene in almost any shape you can imagine) I've created a cut-out of my logo to hang up against my home office wall. Actually, I just sent off the logo and he cut it to perfection.

Polystyrene logo

Polystyrene is often used for insulation purposes in buildings and when producing that material, sometimes things go wrong. For example, sometimes insulative cubes are cut the wrong way and they can't be used on a construction site. When that happens, that waste material has two possible places to go. One is to go into the recycling machine that grinds those cubes into tiny little pieces before they can be used to produce new and perfect cubes for insulating buildings.

Another place where these imperfect cubes can go is to the polystyrene cutter. There, logos or any other shapes are cut to perfection and as you can see, they look great up against an office wall. The material is very light and can be mounted against a wall by using simple double coated tape.

Polystyrene Logo

Here's a time-lapse video of me mounting a polystyrene logo on the wall with nothing but a few pieces of double coated tape. I know that it would look better if we had painted the logo or if I had put a LED light behind the logo, but that's something I might do later down the road.

I'd love to know if you would use this too and for what price? If there would be a demand for home or office decoration like this, maybe it's time to open up an online store. Let me know what you think. Is this a stupid idea or a great idea for an online store?

No comments? But that’s like a Gin & Tonic without the ice?

I’ve removed the comments but you can shoot me a message on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.