WeWork Hangs their Brand on Bay Street

• Is the new WeWork sign on a Bay St. office building in Toronto symbolic of a bounce back in the office building sector, for commercial real estate investors?
• WeWork experiencing a rebirth after tough economic period
• More employees returning to offices

Is a new WeWork sign on Bay St. Toronto a sign of the times? Is sharing office space where the commercial market is going? Green Street, a leading provider of research and advice to the commercial real estate sector frequently discusses the current challenges in Canada. Like so many other markets around the globe, there’s an increased supply and sagging demand.

Canadian investors are diving deeper. The Class A downtown buildings across Canada are in fact well leased, due in part to many successful return-to-the-office corporate initiatives. It’s in the Class B, and Class C sectors, more outside the urban centers, where demand really sags. As more people return to work downtown, they bring the gig economy workers now propelling WeWork’s rebirth.

After months of delay, WeWork finally branded their Bay Street location. Now anyone travelling on Bay between Richmond and Adelaide who happens to glance up is sure to see their building sign. But what the public doesn’t know is how long it took, and how difficult it was to get that sign installed. The true story oddly parallels WeWork’s own meltdown and rebirth.

Struggle For the WeWork Sign on Bay Street

The design and fabrication of the sign were completed on schedule twenty months earlier by Sign Source Solution. It was during the installation phase when things slowed to a crawl. The install date was forever postponed by unforeseen events, not the least of which was WeWork’s own market volatility.  One reason after another led to almost two years of delay.

Hiring special installers and renting a large industrial crane to lift and mount a sign high above busy city sidewalks is a difficult task all by itself. Such an initiative requires permits and inspections.

Two Years of Delay

In this case, the job was more complex because of where it was located; Bay Street is busy and important thoroughfare and the crane would block traffic. The job would have to happen at night but even that was questionable because of so many other construction projects, and roadwork in the downtown core. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and nothing is impossible.

The installers waited for permission, but various municipal officials who are engineers, building inspectors and permit-clerks were slow to grant approvals because they worried about the congestion our installation would create.  Bad weather, mechanical issues, and crowd events also blocked the initiative to the point where Avi Barak, the sign maker who created the piece, lamented how ‘it might be easier to contact SpaceX and launch it into orbit’.

Shared Office Market

Avi’s persistent quest to have his handiwork made permanent in the Toronto skyline mirrors WeWork’s own struggle to survive, and its bad luck in the shared office market it helped create.

WeWork tried to go public in 2019, unsuccessfully. The IPO was pulled when their value was determined to be lower than expected. Everyone involved was disappointed to be sure, but that was just the start of WeWork’s troubles.

One year later, in 2020, their entre business model was nearly obsoleted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The outbreak eliminated all demand for shared office space for twenty months.

Downtown Office Markets Bouncing Back

A May 2025 LinkedIn Pulse post by Don Catalano explains everything so well.  He writes, by the time WeWork stock collapsed and private equity firms started circling, the company had become synonymous with an office sector in crisis.  And he observes how, the flexible future WeWork had been selling had finally arrived. But the company wasn’t in shape to meet it.

WeWork had been in trouble for some time but officially went under in November 2023. Their subsequent refinancing came as a shock to the business community and gig-economy workers who were by then migrating back to office environments. Investors were upset as shareholders typically see their equity diluted or even eliminated, and are usually last in line to recover any portion of their investment.

Perhaps nobody was more affected than Avi Barak, the owner of Sign Source Solution, because his shop had just completed a large and impressive exterior building sign and was in the process of getting it installed in the downtown core.

Toronto WeWork – Exterior Business Sign

Avi’s sign shop fabricated an impressive three-meter-long aluminum acrylic channel letter sign for the top of WeWork’s downtown Toronto office building at 357 Bay Street.  The parts and pieces were brought to the site in a pickup truck and the sign was assembled on sidewalk and in the crane bucket.

The sign is made by combining six letters which are approx. 50 cm in height. The letters have aluminum sides and acrylic faces. There are LEDs lights inside the letters which are programmed to illuminate the sign at night. The whole assembly is mounted on an aluminum channel which is screwed to the bricks on the side of the building, ten stories above the street.

The power unit for the sign is contained inside the building, out of the weather. The transformer is on the wall directly behind the sign and easily accessed.  The junction feeds a low voltage line which powers the sign’s raceway to light up all the letters. Everything outside is weatherproof and will not require any maintenance for ten to fifteen years which is a long time in business.

WeWork’s Sign is Styled for the Future

Signage for tall buildings in a city skyline is a unique design challenge for any sign shop as the branding has to look good from all angles, and be legible day and night, and yet be relatively maintenance free. It has to survive freezing cold temperature and blistering hot summer days. It has to beat the wind, rain and nesting birds.  This sign will meet and exceed those expectations and look good for a quarter century.

LED channel letter signs are a great solution for exterior building signage which is why they’re so common.  They’re ideal for skyline installations on tall buildings because they offer great visibility and have a timeless elegance.