Peggy Wahrlich has a bright smile and a calm attitude that radiates inner peace. It’s hard to believe that his business concept was necessarily due to frustration. She prepares a cappuccino before sitting down to talk about the business, the parents’ attachment, and her history as a founder.
COWOKI, its coworking space, lives in a new construction next to an old neo-Gothic church bell tower in one of Cologne’s most fashionable districts, “Belgisches Viertel” (Belgian quarter). It’s not just a coworking space, it also offers babysitting service. The premises are extended over two floors and more than 200m², also adding a convention room and an unusual kitchen: bright rooms, modern and designer furniture, made of wood and steel, white walls and white desks, dotted with gray or pink chairs. Two vases with giant bouquets of beautiful flowers in the kitchen. A high-end coffee maker. An indispensable utensil in a coworking space. The atmosphere you feel is elegant, but down to earth.
COWOKI offers 30 to 40 jobs and currently nine nursery places, which are absolutely reserved. This is not surprising in Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city, where the search for a nursery takes parents to the limit of despair, especially for young people under the age of three.
In Germany, the deficit in the source of child care for this age organization recently amounts to 300,000 vacancies, as shown by a study by the German Economic Institute in early 2018. Especially in the former West Germany, this gap is huge. While historically many children were cared for at home until they entered kindergarten at the age of three, the demand for early childhood care has been expanding in recent years with the evolution of family models and the previous return of women to work. Factors such as germany’s emerging birth rate, immigration and a lack of skilled staff in day-care centres are adding to the pressure. The result: a “crisis” in the supply of childcare.
For Wahrlich, the lack of cutting-edge opportunities for childcare was the initial driver of his idea. As an independent decorator, she was relatively flexible. ” But being at home with a child pushes you to the limit. In 2002, my oldest daughter was 3 years old, I was looking to have a position where I could only paint and take my son,” recalls the mother of two daughters, now over 17 and 10 years old.
At that time, there was a corresponding initiative (“Zeiträume”) in Cologne, but the monthly payment of € 600 seemed too expensive. In 2010, Wahrlich faced the same situation again. She was disappointed by the fact that “they keep doing their own thing,” while moms stayed home with their children: “It’s unacceptable that all those women stay at home, even if they have a lot of knowledge and are stuck in transitional solutions. “years because of the underdeveloped childcare system. It was a huge dissatisfaction with existing childcare opportunities, combined with the payment he needed to “do anything for women,” which gave Wahrlich the preference to start his own business.
After doing some research, Wahrlich temporarily discovered “Rockzipfel” in Leipzig, which she says is the “pioneer” in Germany when it comes to childcare coworking spaces. Several branches have been established in other German cities such as Dresden, Hamburg and Munich. To Wahrlich, it sounded like a confirmation that his concept has legs: “I’m not alone. There are other mothers in the same scenario, maybe it’s a very smart concept. “He worked on a concept and a business plan, and yet he opened COWOKI in 2017.
Did everything go smoothly? It’s not enough. Wahrlich remembers all the bumps in the road, such as the disintegration laws of the city’s construction and more laws related to the opening of the nursery. Did it take a lot of courage to make the decision to open your own business?Wahrlich thinks, it takes courage, but I was more driven by this anger. It gave me a sure naivety, which probably allowed me to turn a blind eye to some obstacles. But the attractive thing is that you can overcome all those difficulties and grow. I don’t know if I would have dared to do it without that component of naivety. I just felt like I was doing the right thing,” he says.
And this confidence still motivates her today. COWOKI breaks even, but the salary Wahrlich can pay for her and her co-director Melanie von Gersdorff is not high. “We don’t win much, it all depends on the fans we have for the idea. But to be clear: the salary will have to not stay as it is. “
And there is the prospect of an accumulation in the source of income streams with the opening of a momentary childcare organization in August of this year. COWOKI charges €349 per month for a combined pass for coworking and childcare (prices are subject to VAT and do not come with childcare fees that parents must pay to the city). This pass can be used by either parent (not simultaneously).
The coworking area will then have 18 nursery places. Once the organization of the moment works well, Wahrlich considers the concept of COWOKI to be scalable. The founder could open a site of the moment in Cologne in the future. She is convinced that there is a demand.
Christian Cordes, a member of the board of directors of the German Coworking Federation, shares this view. It aligns the opening of coworking spaces providing childcare in Germany to the complicated overall care scenario in the country. However, the mix of coworking and childcare is still a niche product in Germany, Cordes explains. In total, there are around 450 coworking spaces in Germany, but only a dozen of them feature childcare.
Big coworking chains like WeWork or Design Offices typically don’t offer any childcare services, Strings and Wahrlich note (though WeWork runs a school in New York, starting at age two). According to Cordes, it is the private party of the founders that motivates the opening of a coworking area with childcare.
But he also sees a more general trend that coincides with childcare in Germany, driven by women who need to paint and ask for new solutions, men who need to spend more time with their children and do not need to be the sole breadwinner, and parents who lately are paying more and more attention to the concepts of parental attachment, reevaluating, probably like all generations of parents before them, what their children really need.
The roles, social styles, and desires of families are evolving while answers and new answers are still lacking. Wahrlich’s confidence is that Americans will have to create those missing opportunities. And that’s what he did, turning frustration into a business style and turning his career into a founder’s trail.