ECLAT FOUNDER - MELBOURNE COWORKING
How Jesse Hayes developed and founded Eclat as a coworking, hospitality and design-led workplace brand in Melbourne. Eclat is not simply an office space, but a broader commercial framework integrating brand, interior design, technology, customer experience and operational systems.
PERIOD OF APPLIED DISCIPLINE
2013 - Ongoing
Eclat began long before there was a company, a site or a fitout. It began with a single word.
In 2011, while still serving in the Australian Army, I acquired the eclat.com domain, not for a trivial sum at the time. There was no business model. No commercial plan. No concept. Not even a fully formed idea. What I had was a conviction: that the word held unusual power and potential, and that if treated with enough care and discipline, it could one day become something extraordinary.
What drew me to it was that "ECLAT" didn't describe a thing, a place or a product. It suggested something more abstract and more enduring. Brilliance. Presence. Distinction. Ovation. Energy. That mattered deeply, because even then I knew I would never be interested in building something narrowly defined. I wanted to build a brand capable of holding a deeper idea. The strongest brands don't describe what they are. They make you feel that you should care, and then show you why.
The founding catalyst was simple, if quietly ambitious: "to be brilliant." Not brilliance as performance. Not as spectacle. Not ego. But as a principle, a celebration of what emerges when people bring their best thinking, effort, craft and character together to create things greater than the sum of their parts. Whatever Eclat eventually became, I aspired for it to be one of those endeavours. Or it wouldn't be Eclat.
After the Army, I opened Eclat Creative in Williamstown — a 1960s warehouse, stripped back and rebuilt into part photography studio, part creative workspace, part event venue. It wasn't the final form of Eclat. It was the beginning. A place to create, to test ideas, and to bring my range of professional disciplines under a single identity for the first time.
Then came the rise of mainstream coworking.
I watched the coworking market closely. It was impressive in scale, but the more I observed, the clearer the gap became. Across the sector, the same patterns kept appearing: generic branding, repetitive design language, environments built for function but not feeling. The spaces worked, but they rarely resonated. They didn't elevate. They weren't deeply considered. And they didn't reflect the kind of integrated, human-centred experience I believed the future of work demanded.
That was the moment Eclat's direction became clear. It would not be yet another flexible office brand. It would be a fundamentally different kind of space, one that treated hospitality, design, technology and brand as core, unified components of a single experience. A place where people didn't simply work because they had to, but one they genuinely wanted to be.
What followed was neither easy nor immediate. Years of proposition development. Years of writing business plans, refining commercial logic, analysing the market and trying to articulate a model that sat outside conventional thinking. Each failed conversation exposed something that needed clarifying. The vision became stronger precisely because it had to survive rejection and misunderstanding.
Over time, what had begun as instinct became something far more deliberate: a clear, integrated and defensible proposition sitting between commercial real estate, hospitality, design, technology and lifestyle.
In many ways, the period that followed validated what I had spent years trying to articulate. The Melbourne coworking market began moving toward conclusions I had long held: that experiential design mattered, that genuine hospitality within the workplace mattered, that generic office environments were no longer sufficient, and that people expected spaces to offer something more meaningful than cheap desks and free apples. What had once seemed too different or too early was suddenly easier for others to see.
Eclat Hawthorn East became the first real proof of concept. But it was only the beginning of the real work. Founding Eclat was never just about having an idea. It was about carrying responsibility for what it claimed to be. Protecting it. Building it.
SCOPE OF WORK
Domain & Early Brand Authorship (2011)
— Acquisition of eclat.com as a foundational long-term brand asset; initial trademark application; establishing the conceptual foundation and treating the brand as an asset to be protected from the outset
Eclat Creative — First Trading Entity (2013)
— Opening the first commercial expression of the Eclat brand in Williamstown post-military service; creating a hybrid photography studio, creative workspace and event venue; beginning the process of bringing creative, technical and spatial disciplines under one identity
Proposition Development (2015–2020)
— Sustained market research, observation and analysis across the coworking sector; development of long-form business proposals and commercial thesis documents; refining through resistance and converting instinct into a precise, resilient and defensible business model
First Physical Embodiment (2021)
— Translating the Eclat proposition into a live commercial environment through Eclat Hawthorn East; establishing the first proof that the model could exist beyond paper and planning; creating the benchmark for how the brand should feel when fully realised
Stewardship & Governance
— Protecting the integrity of the original vision across every decision; treating sound governance as structural necessity rather than administrative formality; maintaining alignment between what the brand claimed to be and what people actually experienced
HOW ECLAT WAS CREATED
A proof of concept that asked a simple question: could a workspace feel genuinely luxurious without sacrificing function? The answer, it turned out, was yes. The first Eclat location established the tone and the conviction that would carry the brand forward. The following chapters describe the disciplines through which the founding vision of Eclat became a real brand, a functioning system and a physical place, while striving to create a company worth expanding and protecting.