Thinking outside the mop

As a company at the cutting edge of the technology sector, Mind Candy’s new headquarters in Bonhill Street – the heart of London’s silicon roundabout – are anything but ordinary. Mind Candy is the world's fastest growing digital entertainment company and creator of Moshi Monsters. In the online Moshi world, children can adopt their own ‘monster’, go on adventures, play games, solve puzzles, be creative, and interact with their friends. Over 65 million children have joined the online community, and Moshi has expanded into the offline world through books, magazines, trading cards, toys, video games, music, mobile apps, cartoons and more.

Moshi Monsters live in a forest – so that’s reflected in the décor of the newly refurbished surroundings. Split over two floors, covering around 30,000 sq. ft., and housing around 200 staff when fully occupied, the majority of the flooring is astro turf. The reception desk is a large tree trunk and the boardroom is a log cabin. Children test the games in a room converted into a tree-house and a stainless steel slide enables children and staff to shoot down to the lower floor. Velvet sofas in the breakout areas, a 16ft wooden dining table and an array of colourful bean bags are just some of the additional furnishings requiring specialist cleaning techniques.

Brand awareness

Apart from taking care of these different surfaces and materials, cleaning provider Julius Rutherfoord had to create a deeper understanding of how the brand, as Andy de Sallis, the company's sales and marketing director explains. "Hi-tech, highly creative environments such as the Mind Candy offices need cleaning regimes which reflect how the company works. For example, their offices have huge expanses of white walling – called ‘scrum walls’ – that are used by software companies to project manage software and product development. As a consequence, they are covered in coloured sticky notes, each of which details a task to be completed within a given timescale. Our staff know only to clean these areas when the client tells us it’s safe to do so – thus guarding against the loss of some key piece of coding or the next big product idea!”

Henry mutates into a Moshi!

The ability to truly understand and ‘get under the skin’ of the Moshi Monster brand was, de Sallis believes, one of the reasons that Julius Rutherfoord won the contract with Mind Candy. As part of the tender, they re-branded a Henry vacuum as the Moshi Monster character Diavlo – an idea that instantly struck a chord with Mind Candy’s management team. The scuff-proof graphics on all the Diavlo vacuums fit the surroundings and the vacuums also deliver impressive cleaning results for all the flooring surfaces.

Security 

Julius Rutherfoord’s stringent security vetting procedures also set it apart. When recruiting staff, the company uses similar passport and identity document scanning technology as that used by Customs personnel at international airports. Every passport and ID document is scanned to check its authenticity against an international database in the Netherlands which holds the details of passports and other forms of ID from over 200 countries. This technology enables fake passports or ID documents to be identified in seconds which means that Mind Candy is guaranteed a 100% legal workforce.

In addition, employees sign in and out with a short phone call, from a dedicated line within Mind Candy’s premises that is linked automatically to Julius Rutherfoord’s time and attendance system. They have two ways to check who's making the call – caller ID to check where they're calling from and a unique pin code they must enter. The system also guarantees that Mind Candy get the exact level of service they have paid for.