Week 1 — lock artwork and the date
Custom patches take two to three weeks to produce, which makes patch artwork the long pole of the entire project. In week one, two decisions matter: the date (check it against all-hands calendars, office-attendance patterns, and any parallel facilities work in the lobby) and the patch menu. Send whatever brand files you have — vector preferred — and we’ll return patch mockups in each construction so the approval is visual, not hypothetical. Everything else in the plan can flex; patch production cannot.
Week 2 — building paperwork and headcount math
Introduce us to your property manager by email and consider that job finished: COI, freight elevator booking, and the security roster are ours to chase. Meanwhile, get a real headcount estimate. Badge data or RSVP tools beat guessing — the difference between 200 and 320 participants changes hat orders, crew count, and service windows. Rule of thumb: expect 60–75% of on-site staff to participate when the bar is in a lobby they walk past anyway.
Week 3 — approve the hat wall and the schedule
You’ll sign off on the exact cap styles and colorways — we recommend two silhouettes, four colors for offices; enough choice to feel personal, not enough to stall the line. Then set service windows. Two windows beat one long slog: 11:00–1:00 catches the lunch flow, 2:00–3:30 collects the meeting-locked crowd. Post it internally with a photo of the actual patches; specificity drives turnout more than any “fun surprise in the lobby!” teaser.
Week 4 — run of show
We arrive 60–90 minutes before the first window, build, and do a test press. Your only day-of jobs: one internal reminder post when the bar opens, and someone to take the photo leadership will inevitably ask for. Strike takes forty-five minutes and the lobby is back to normal before evening security walks it. The following morning you’ll have our wrap notes — hats pressed per window, leftover inventory, and what we’d adjust for the next one.
Shorter runway? Three weeks is workable when patch art is approved in the first 48 hours. Two weeks means stock patch options only — possible, but the custom menu is what makes the format sing. Details on the office format live here; numbers live on the pricing page.
The budget conversation, sized for an HR line item
The numbers that survive procurement: a staffed lobby activation starts around $5,000 locally, crew time bills at $250 an hour including build and strike, and offices outside the Southern California footprint add a flat $900 travel fee. For a 250-person office at 70% participation, that works out to roughly the cost of a mid-tier catered lunch — except a sandwich is gone by 1 p.m. and the caps are still in the building a year later. Two windows across one day is almost always cheaper than two separate half-days, because the second load-in is the expense that never shows up on intuition. Full math sits on the cost answer.
When one office becomes four
Multi-site rollouts — same activation, run across regional offices over a quarter — are where the four-week timeline pays compound interest. Patch art approves once. The hat wall spec approves once. Each subsequent office contributes only its own week-two paperwork and headcount, which trims the per-site runway to about two weeks after the first. Order patches for the whole program up front: one production run for four offices costs meaningfully less than four small runs, and the leftover stock from a light-turnout site rolls forward to the next one instead of stranding budget.
The mistakes we see twice a quarter
Three, reliably. Booking the lobby on a heavy work-from-home day — check badge data, not the org chart, because a Thursday bar outdraws a Friday bar by a third. Letting the patch menu balloon past eight options because three departments each wanted two designs; the line pays for that diplomacy at ninety seconds a decision. And skipping the internal announcement photo — posts with a picture of the physical patches reliably double walk-up turnout versus text-only invites. All three are free to fix in week one, which is the point of having a timeline at all. A fourth, honorable mention: forgetting that the freight elevator books out two weeks ahead in most Class A buildings — which is exactly why the property-manager introduction happens in week two and not the Friday before.