Building Community from the Inside Out
In 2015, a young and hungry Oscar Pierre returned to his home city of Barcelona to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship that would ultimately lead him to founding Glovo. Armed with a mission to give everyone easy access to anything in their city and together with Co-Founder Sacha Michaud and a lean team working towards the same dream, Glovo quickly grew from a small startup to a tech unicorn in just four years.
Eight years later, we have expanded to over 1,500 cities in 25 countries, growing from a small start up to a major player in the multi-category delivery industry. Despite this international growth, staying close to local communities has always been a priority – especially when it comes to Barcelona, the city that we have called home since the start.
To celebrate this long relationship, we opened our new global headquarters in November 2022 in one of the most dynamic business areas of the city, Poble Nou. Poble Nou is also known as 22@, an area where many tech companies are located in Barcelona. The city, being a magnet for international talent, and the fact that we have always bet on this area, made calling it home for the years to come an easy choice to make.
Dubbed Yellow Park, our new HQ is helping to foster our company culture and a sense of community both at the office and in the surrounding neighborhood. Having a positive impact on local communities means understanding what matters to them. That is why our focus is on enhancing the lives of people in their cities, rather than just being another global corporation.
Investing in our future
Yellow Park is one of our biggest investments in employee wellbeing. With this new office concept, we want to foster our company values and culture while reaffirming our commitment to Barcelona as our home, supporting the city’s attractiveness for talent from all over the world.
Yellow Park is equipped with a space of 30,000 m2 divided into two buildings. It has a capacity for nearly 3,000 employees, a beautiful inner courtyard, and a ground floor with space for events.
With sustainability being a driving factor for us, we wanted to ensure that the space was not just good for people, but for the environment. Yellow Park has been certified by Leed Platinum with sustainability credentials which certifies that the building saves energy, water and resources, and generates less waste. Yellow Park has also been fitted with green spaces that work to enhance the wellbeing of employees.
As of May 2023, we have already achieved our Science Based Targets initiative backed goal of having more than 30% of our facilities worldwide be powered by renewable energy, contributing to our goal of reducing carbon emissions across our value chain by 42.12% by 2030.
Yellow Park is the culmination of work across many departments and stakeholders at Glovo and was even built taking into account employee feedback. We want to pay tribute to all the countries where we operate and that is why every floor is named after a country, and even includes the equipment and designs related to its culture – for example all rooms are named after a city where we operate. In addition to that, some touches to the different cultures are present throughout the office: Polish patterns, earthenware from Portugal, Kazah paintings, Bulgarian cushions, Romanian ceramics and a mural full of employees photos from all these years, among others.
While our journey has just begun at Yellow Park, our wish is to be a leader not only as a multi-category tech platform, but among all tech companies seeking to call Barcelona their home and with the community we hope to build from the inside out. As the saying goes, “if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”