When Justin Woolf and his now-wife, Brooke, both applied for a broista position while they were in college, she was the one who got the job.
“It’s pretty funny,” he said. “I had applied a bunch of times, but I didn’t get it right away. [Brooke] got hired before me.”
Justin did eventually get hired as a Broista and both managed different stands around Salem, Oregon.
“I was going to school for graphic design,” Woolf said. “I was just working at Dutch Bros to just make money [during college], and I loved the company. I actually didn’t even know that Dutch Bros had a graphic design department.”
When he first attended COACHA, he came home with a goal.
“When I went back to school, I put all my focus into joining the Dutch Bros design department,” Woolf said. “I was building a portfolio and doing freelance work while I was working in a stand, waiting for a job to open up.”
Now he’s been at HQ for more than five years. Typically the department all works in the same room, but with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, he’s now managing his team remotely, which is a dramatic change in pace and energy.
“[The design room] is pretty wild,” Woolf said. “It’s fun. It’s loud. I try really hard to replicate the culture that’s in the stands in the design room.”
It’s a challenge to replicate that office culture when the team is working from home, but Woolf is making every effort to make it happen with the use of FaceTime and Zoom.
The design team is accustomed to coming into the office, drinking coffee together, and talking about what they did the night before or what’s going on in their lives. Woolf wanted to simulate that same routine remotely.
“It was one thing I didn’t want to lose,” Woolf said. “So every day we have a design meeting [over Zoom], a 30-minute thing at 9 o’clock every morning. We don’t talk about work at all. We’re all drinking our coffee together even when we’re apart.”
One of the designers, Allegra, even went into the office and took a photo of everyone’s desk so the designers could make it their Zoom background.
“It makes it look like we’re sitting at our actual desk and feel like we were in the room,” Woolf said. “It’s important to try to make everybody feel as normal as possible.”
They even host a beer “anti-social” on Fridays via Zoom, where the team logs on and drinks their beverage of choice to kick off the weekend together.
“It’s just people connecting,” Woolf said. “Some of the team is isolated by themselves in their houses, and their family is the design team. I want to create as many opportunities as I can for everybody to get together and know that even though they’re alone, they’re not alone.”