By now it’s a cliche. If you’re a startup, you have a ping pong table in your office. Maybe, if you’re one of those fancy startups, you’ve got a foosball table, a slide, or a corner full of beanbag chairs, too. But for a certain type of company in 2016, a ping pong table is like cell phones or toilets---it’s a given.
The table is probably sitting there in the middle of your open plan office, a beacon of fun and youthful spirit amongst the communal desks and laptops. To be sure, ping pong tables are great---who doesn’t love a game of table tennis after totally crushing a release cycle deadline? But your standard issue pong table isn’t saying what you think it is. To you it says “we’re a cool, young startup who cares about work-life balance.” To pretty much everyone else it says, “we have red cups in our filing cabinets.”
Poppin is an office supply company that bills itself as the startup that helps other startups. It provides staplers, paper clips, desktop organizers, and now a new and improved ping pong conference table. Poppin calls it the "Series A" (yes, really), and recommends it to companies with anywhere from 50 to 200 employees. These are kinds of budding startups where a ping pong table might be included in your benefits package, so it’s a savvy move.
I wanted to roll my eyes at yet another work-meets-play design, but Poppin’s table is actually pretty cool. It’s minimalist---all-white with a colored stripe down the middle---and it pulls double duty. The company is quick to say it’s a conference table first, ping pong table second. “This is about making a meaningful piece of business furniture that converts into something that’s fun,” says Jeff Miller, Poppin’s head of design. Fair enough. The table is regulation size (5x9 feet), and can sit up to 12 people. The net and paddles are hidden in a compartment that only reveals itself when the two sides are pulled apart. That same compartment has a slit for phones or router wires to go through, and the slit is just narrow enough that a ping pong ball can’t slip out.
For a simple table, it’s well-considered. The table is built on the same beam and lever system that all of Poppin’s tables and desks are. Miller explains that it would’ve been easier to just build the table with an off-the-shelf sliding mechanism that would allow the ping pong table to slide open like the average dining room table. Instead, he and his team built a custom roller and bracket that attaches to the beams on the table's underside, which gives it a continuity with the rest of the company’s furniture products. “I think there’s some inherent appreciation that the system has been thought about cleverly,” he says. Of course, very few people are going to care about how the table opens---they just want it to open, period.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Poppin’s first ping pong conference table was its second best seller, behind its filing cabinets, which are a less obvious nod to the company’s “work happy” motto. The tables costs $3,000. “That’s a great price for a conference table, and thats very expensive for a ping pong table,” Miller says. And just in case your company hasn’t quite reached conference table success levels, good news: Poppin is currently at work on a coffee table that turns into a corn hole set.
