Maggie Spicer, Founder of WHISK
Maggie Spicer is a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur whose projects span more than 15 years. After creating the company culture consulting firm WHISK in 2012, she has launched gathering space BAANA, Douglas corner store, Kismet Comptoir online épicerie fine, 86Fund for small food businesses, and DAF Angels, which places donor-advised funds with socially and environmentally responsible founders. She’s currently building a hospitality-driven, historically significant, real estate project along the French Basque Coast
As San Francisco Design Week electrifies our city with Multitudes this month, don’t forget to RSVP for Maggie’s sensory workshop “Taste As Design” at Jackson Square on Tuesday, 06.09, 5-6.30 pm. For Journal, Maggie shares why the bathroom deserves more of everyone’s attention, and how to live richly, experientially, in the world of tech and AI.
You oversee a wide diversity of interleaving projects under the WHISK umbrella. What’s the full-stack elevator pitch?
I take hospitality, food, and lifestyle brands and projects from zero to one—from idea to opening day (or launch). Typically, I work with brick-and-mortar spaces, specifically boutique hotels, specialty coffee, curated food shops, and wine bars, as well as consumer packaged goods (CPG).
I’ve catalyzed more than $25M of philanthropic capital. I’m also a discerning luxury concierge. A consistent element of my work is surfacing the best of the best—not necessarily the most premium, luxurious, or expensive, but the best expression of something, whether it’s a croissant, a stay, or a paint color. We have this one mind in its human form, regardless of how much AI and tech pop up around us—why not use our knowledge and resources to seek out and experience the best?
What was your inspiration to create WHISK?
Back in 2012, when the companies that we now use as verbs were just getting started—Airbnb, IDEO, Lyft, Twitch, Instacart, Hotel Tonight—I had this hunch that the employee experiences that Google offered would become the norm as people left over time to join a smaller firm or start their own.
As is so often the case, I had the idea to cater to workplace culture two or three years ahead of the trend, which is fun yet maddening—this was before there were line items in the budget for “employee experience”.
Our first contracts were financed through companies’ catering or events spend. WHISK spanned several categories that I always wanted to sell as a package. One was food and incredible snacks. Back then, on the West Coast, the happy hour vibe was often a ping-pong table, beer, and pizza, but we would bring in something much more thoughtful—an on-site craft cocktail bar or a cold-pressed organic juice bar.
We also had an aesthetics and ergonomics category, so if a company was expanding or developing its first professional office layout, we’d place art and floral designers and work with Design Within Reach or Herman Miller for furnishings.
For fitness and wellness, we would bring in nutritionists to lead workshops for engineers on avoiding carbs at lunch to help them avoid feeling sleepy. We would introduce a meditation teacher, a breathwork expert, massage, and yoga in the workplace before any of this was commonplace.
How did your remit at WHISK evolve over time?
When company decision-makers came to understand my taste, trustworthiness, and follow-through, they would often ask me to help with other scopes: team offsites, launches, experiential marketing campaigns, investor meetings, company milestone events.
During its early years, Airbnb was moving offices and had no kitchen for eight weeks. Their in-house culinary director hired me to curate a different cuisine and local, independent vendor for lunch and dinner each day for eight weeks because I understood the local food ecosystem. Several years later, another department at the company was trying to understand why platform adoption rates were so low among potential hosts in certain markets. They contracted WHISK to conduct an ethnographic, anthropological research campaign—I’d studied anthropology in school, and so that’s how I pitched my approach to the problem.
As time evolved, perhaps three years into WHISK, titles like “Head of Workplace”, “Employee Experience”, or “Vibe Manager” began to appear. By the end of 2017, I had launched BAANA, a communal multi-use creative convening space, and several creative projects under that umbrella. We hosted curated pop-ups from different cultures around the world—Made in: Mexico, Made in: Tunisia, Made in: Denmark—featuring retail experiences, dinners, talks, and design panels. I had also launched Secret Breakfast Society and then Douglas corner store, plus a few other things under the WHISK umbrella.
We became known as the agency that surprises and delights customers and team members with incredible experiences, as well as solves the unsolvable friction in bringing an event or experience to life. To the latter effect, a fixer of sorts. But while the agency had grown strongly into a successful company in corporate events and experiential marketing—something I was not interested in doing exclusively—by late 2019 I started to turn my attention to hospitality design, something I’d been researching and studying voraciously, globally, concurrent to running WHISK.
Do you have a consistent initial step when conceptualizing a project, whether that’s designing products and spaces or delivering funding and premium concierge experiences
I often study what goes unsaid, what’s unspoken—I very much relate to Japanese culture—and I’m able to track patterns and see trends. When I walk into a space, my native, natural tendency is more on the environment and how we experience it from a sensory perspective. I’m still designing for people and for the guest experience, but I’m not immediately thinking about the human—I’m thinking more about how the human is supported, held, or navigated through space.
Aside from the five senses, I think about the nervous system, and how to calm it, or transport the guest somewhere else. I consider it from my personal lens of whether the basics are covered. What is it like to wash and dry my hands in the bathroom? Is the flush aggressive? How’s the lighting? The textures of the towel and loo paper? A bathroom should surprise you a little bit.
I’ve seen (and listened to) stories where you explore why restaurant bathroom design should never be an afterthought. How does this niche fit your oeuvre?
As an introvert, I view bathrooms as very much a third space in a restaurant context. Dining can be a really intimate experience, and tense moments can happen at a dining table—perhaps someone’s getting engaged or breaking up; they could be navigating a challenging family moment or decompressing after a really intense day at the office. In addition to washing your hands or using the toilet, a lot of people, it turns out, go into the bathroom to just have a moment of neutral space—to breathe, check their phone, or disengage from whatever they’re experiencing in the dining room.
When traveling, I had the privilege of enjoying dining experiences from New York to Japan to Copenhagen to Paris and London. I started to wonder why, particularly at a tasting menu experience, the hand soap is generic, or the overhead lighting is fluorescent. More often than not, the owner had chosen to redirect the budget away from the bathroom toward nicer chairs or similar. In my work, I aim for design to be comprehensive, and I want the guest experience to remain consistent, even if a component is abrasive or unexpected.
Is there a bathroom that stands out in your mind?
There was a restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that became famous almost more for its bathroom than the food. They had installed one-way glass so it looks like you’re literally having the pastry chefs or the garde manger watch you while you’re using the toilet—it’s only when you read an article or talk to someone there that you realize they can’t see in.
I don’t think the restaurant did it for the press. I think they genuinely did it because they wanted to do something expressive and conversation-worthy, but it fostered an almost viral-like expectation that when you go into a bathroom in a nice enough establishment, whether it’s a hotel or bed-and-breakfast or a coffee shop or a restaurant, that there would be some kind of thoughtfulness or an extension of the brand. Why wouldn’t someone extend that into the bathroom?
How did you move into the world of philanthropic venture capital?
I learned about donor-advised funds (DAFs) in early 2020. A friend introduced me to someone who had spent 30 years in private equity before switching to the philanthropic side. At the time, there was literally no literature available on the internet—this was pre-ChatGPT—on how to steward capital from a DAF to a for-profit entity, but my mentor told me it was possible.
I was deep in my research early in the pandemic in San Francisco, at a critical point when many PPP loans had been exhausted or weren’t being forgiven. For example, if there was a break-in and the restaurant chose to use the money to repair the glass in a window, it didn’t count towards loan forgiveness. So instead of launching the fund for my own initiatives—supporting CPG companies and other lifestyle brands—I turned it into a restaurant fund and appointed independent review and finance committees.
Restaurants submitted an application. The review committee and I reviewed all the applications. We went through several grant-making cycles and ended up helping to keep SF-defining restaurants Rintaro, Plow, The Progress, State Bird, etc. in business. In the case of the latter two, they decided to give their grant to a local fisherman so he could buy a larger boat to bring more anchovies—a really sustainable form of protein—from the Bay.
How did this experience inform your philanthropic venture investment arm, DAF Angels?
Fast-forward: I started interfacing a fair amount with high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and customers I’d had at Douglas, advising them on how they could angel-invest with their philanthropic capital. DAF Angels is a platform and consultancy where I can help make more of those deals happen. A lot of folks on the food side aren’t well-equipped with how the finance side of things works and don’t necessarily have access to the smartest deals; many aren’t aware that there are alternative forms of more founder-friendly, beneficial capital available to them.
Conversely, finance people often don’t really understand how the challenges of a service-based restaurant or food business works—they don’t understand how exhausting it can be putting out fire after fire, and how much creativity and tenacity it elicits from the owner. Donors also don’t necessarily know that their favorite restaurant down the street could really use an infusion of cash. People are generally not comfortable having a direct conversation about a topic as sensitive as money.
Because I sit in that niche of having firsthand experience on both sides of the equation, I’m able to speak both languages and connect the dots of really deserving CPG, environmental, and hospitality brands with founder-friendly capital and donors who want to have a local, tangible impact with their tax-advantaged capital.
Do you have any WHISK projects you want to focus on in the coming months?
At the front-and-center of what WHISK is today, I’m putting my foot forward in the zero-to-one space, from idea to opening day or launch. We also have a couple of foraging-centric retreats coming up this September in France, as well as the launch of our new premium concierge service.
Additionally, I’m embarking on realizing Itxas Gaina, “above the ocean” in Basque, the hospitality real estate project in Biarritz. Can’t wait to bring this years-in-the-development project to fruition.
As sauna culture and bathing culture takes off in the Bay Area, I’m primed to bring The Ofuro project and its hinoki wood Japanese soaking tubs front and center. The Oturo tubs are made by hand to order by master craftsmen in their 70s in Japan—they’ve dedicated their entire life to this singular craft. We’re working with the only certified miller of hinoki wood in Nikko, where the wood is native. I could have chosen to work with a company that’s producing them more cheaply by machine with non-certified wood, but then this incredible knowledge and skill would be lost.
It’s not a one-to-one replacement for a bathtub—you don’t shower in it or use soap or traditional amenities—so it’s a tricky item to sell to people who have never experienced Japanese bathing culture, but it pulls at my heartstrings.
I’m still called to be an entrepreneur, to build bridges for others, and bring a discerning, curatorial lens to projects.
How do you think hospitality and experiences will evolve in the age of AI?
I think rapport will still be important. When you go to a restaurant, and you know the chef or someone on the team, having that human connection—they know what you’ll order or which is your favorite table. In 2013, Frank Bruni, the New York restaurant critic who was always going to exciting new spots, wrote a lovely piece on the pleasures of being a regular. He really loved going to his favorite steakhouse where they knew exactly what temperature he wanted his meat cooked to and how he liked his wine served.
Recently, I overheard someone talking about going to a robot-first restaurant where you order on a screen, a robot cooks the food, and there is no human other than your fellow diners. She said it was awful. That’s not why we go to restaurants, especially if we’re dining alone—we want connection, to feel transported. Even though a lot of venture funding, say, has gone toward an influencer’s mushroom latte or matcha beverage brand—a huge following means lower marketing spend and faster success—I would much rather go to The Coffee Movement or Hedge for the actual lived guest experience. It’s a vibe. I think we’ll see more experiences that combine the sensorial and third spaces with other threads we’d usually keep separate—in the same way the sauna is becoming the new boardroom, where deals are made.
As part of your mission to find the best of the best, have you made any recent discoveries in San Francisco that you’d like to share with CANOPY Members?
Last week, totally by accident, I stumbled upon the second location of a baker I’ve known for a long time—her bakery is called Le Dix-Dept which means “The 17th” in French, for the Paris arrondissement—in Potrero Hill. It was four in the afternoon—not the time of day that you’d typically order a croissant—yet I decided to split one with my friend, and I’m so glad we did: it’s one of the best croissants I have ever tasted. (And having spent four and a half years in France, where croissants and baguettes are an every-morning treat, I’ve eaten a fair amount of croissants.)
How does your Ambassador Membership at CANOPY support you in your work?
I joined CANOPY in 2021. Aesthetic is paramount in my work, and I was attracted to CANOPY’s design-forward nature. I’m a huge proponent of working from a visually interesting space—even when I have a dedicated office, I like to mix it up and work from a beautiful café, hotel lobby, or library as I feel more inspired and do better work. (I literally A/B tested being at CANOPY and working in a generic white box with uncomfortable furniture and fluorescent lights.)
I love how my membership allows me to pop into any location, although I’m most frequently at Jackson Square—I like the scale, the size, and the views, and the fact that it spans more than one floor with outdoor space. Access to the sky gives a sense of freedom and oxygen, and helps to balance the pressure of being an entrepreneur and a woman holding the masculine and feminine at the same time, all the time.
With Yves Béhar as the lead designer, the community is made up of style-forward individuals and companies, and I like that it’s inclusive of different industries and verticals, not just tech—there’s potential to be a great place to network and meet people across ages, backgrounds, and genders. The programming is diverse and well-rounded, though I unfortunately miss much of it since I’m only in San Francisco a few times per year.
My nature, wherever I am, is to surface the hidden gems and the best of the best. As an experienced hospitality designer, having a space that’s beautiful and inspiring dovetails into my work, curating people and spaces, and enables me to host guests for meetings or panels. My contributions are community-oriented and bring people together around education, experience, taste, the senses.
I like how membership is kept at a fair human scale so there’s always a space open to work. I’ve actually run into a few people I know independently of CANOPY who now have their offices there. Sure, it’s a small world, but I think the people who are drawn to more inspiring spaces choose CANOPY.
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Follow Maggie on LinkedIn and on Instagram @maggiefspicer.
Follow WHISK on Instagram @whisk.sf.
Listen to her piece on #onbrandbathrooms in Copenhagen. Learn about WHISK’s upcoming REWILDING retreat in Biarritz.