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  Celebrating at the party - Brand Manager Rick Irons

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  Photos of Jamie Lynn and Shane Dorian in the hallway - Photo courtesy of Dragon

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  The party in the parking lot - Photo courtesy of Dragon

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  The lobby of the new Dragon headquarters in San Clemente - Photo courtesy of Dragon

Dragon celebrated its move into new headquarters in San Clemente last week.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to attend the party but followed up with CEO Will Howard to find out a little about the space and why Dragon moved north from Carlsbad.

Why move to San Clemente? 

Will Howard: San Clemente is the original birthplace of Dragon in 1993.  We are returning to our home.  San Clemente is where many of us live now, and where we grew up, including myself.  It’s a great place to live and work. 

When my parents moved the family here in 1972, my Dad had to commute to Los Angeles for work.  I feel very lucky to be able to live and work in my hometown.

Did your new owners help in any way? 

Will Howard: The Marchon team was key in helping us find our new location and relocate our entire operation to SC.  There is an amazing amount of work that goes into moving an ongoing operation without interruption, and we could not have done it without our partners.

How big is the space? 

Will Howard: We are in approximately the same square footage that we had in our previous building, just under 30,000 square feet.  The key difference is the workspace layout, which we were able to build out from scratch and is essentially an open work environment, with work areas organized around departments. 

The idea is to promote easy collaboration among departments and within departments. 

One great thing is that the space has a noise-canceling feature that runs throughout the building. It allows small groups of people to have discussions at normal voice levels and it prevents the cross noise of those conversations from carrying outside of the immediate area. 

When small groups are having a conversation you think that they are whispering with each other.  It took some time for everyone to get used to it.

How is business going so far this year?  

Will Howard: We have had a good year, and are on plan globally.  We have had a successful launch of the H2O Floatable series of sunglasses.

Also, our pre-orders on the new Dragon X2 snow goggle and Nike snow goggle line were the best ever for us for product launches.  The next year is lining up great.