Allspring Global Investments officially made its move to Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward Monday, welcoming approximately 300 employees to its new office.
The global investment management firm, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina with offices worldwide, opened a 42,000-square-foot office at 417 E. Chicago St.
Allspring was formerly known as Strong Financial Corp. before it was acquired by Wells Fargo in 2005. It then began operating under the Allspring brand in 2021 after Wells Fargo sold its asset management arm. Under those previous iterations, the company was based in a 164,306-square-foot office facility in Menomonee Falls, which was sold in December to Milwaukee Tool.
Among the benefits of the Third Ward office for Allspring is easier transportation for clients from across the globe, with easy access to major highways, the Milwaukee Intermodal Station and Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, facilities manager Dave Bullock said.
“We really wanted to take advantage of the single tenant building and put our name outside,” Bullock said. “We basically have it at all the entrances and on the sides. We want to make sure everybody knew this was Allspring coming into the neighborhood and establishing a presence here.”
When Allspring toured the Chicago Street office space, which was originally constructed in 1964, it was laid out like many 20th century offices with private offices on the perimeter of the building and common areas and other work spaces on the interior. Allspring opted to invert that structure, tearing down several interior walls to place common areas and workspaces near windows, and private offices and focus rooms for private conversations on the interior.
Art is also a key part of the facility, as local artists provided most of the pieces in the space, intermixed with some antiques held over from the Menomonee Falls location.
“We went for a lighter color palette and something that felt almost like a hotel in our common areas with different seating options, unique art and design elements,” Bullock said, emphasizing things like patterned wallpapers and exposed beams.
Allspring worked with Chicago-based Pepper Construction as the project’s general contractor and the Chicago office of San Francisco-based Gensler as the project’s lead architect.
Allspring oversees about $600 billion of assets, managing mutual funds that the company gained through its prior iteration as Wells Fargo Asset Management. It has 1,400 total staff across 20 offices in nine countries, which made updates to the office’s technology and virtual capabilities especially important.
“The old building was challenging with our technology for a variety of reasons,” Bullock said. “It was spread out, choppy. In this new building, it was a big focus to be able to make sure that people could take advantage of stepping away from their desk and still being able to work anywhere in the whole space, including outside. We’ve focused a lot on making sure our Microsoft Teams packages were optimized with the technology that’s in here. We’ve also focused a lot on trying to make it easy for our employees to get in and out of the building with Bluetooth technology, and so on.”
