Apartment Therapy Media

They were designed to embody the ideal employee profile, describing the top qualities of our team. And because the team is continuously evolving and changing, we refresh  the values every few years. With our most recent iteration in spring 2025, we held a series of meetings where our Founder & CEO spoke with employees about the updated ideologies in an interactive and educational setting. Our values are lived out in our everyday work by being discussed in our weekly standup meetings, acknowledged with quarterly awards, and being included in our annual performance review process. 

Having literally written a book about our company values! Our Founder & CEO, Maxwell Ryan, founded the company nearly 20 years ago. When our standard business practices began to take shape, he wrote “The Inspiration Book,” which serves as the primary guide to our culture and ways of working. This book is provided to every employee when they begin at Apartment Therapy Media. Once per quarter, Maxwell meets with the new hires to review some key philosophies and answer their questions. And annually, we review the Inspiration Book as a full organization to reiterate its importance and discuss how we see its philosophies lived out in our work. These meetings are also led by Maxwell and it’s exciting to see him so engaged with the company values in this way.

We have a robust and active focus on DEI work. We have two Employee Resource Groups (The Change Initiative for BIPOC employees, and The Kvetchn for Jewish employees). While these ERG’s mostly serve as a source of community, our People Operations team works with them on initiatives or communications that may be impactful to them. In 2025, our People Operations team doubled-down on our DEI initiatives and published vision & approach document.

We regularly return to business philosophies that champion decision making (a “Decision Tree” model encouraging decision-making at all levels, feedback (“The 4A’s - Aim to Assist; Actionable; Appreciate; Accept or Discard”), and collaborative business practices (“Disagree & Commit,” encouraging healthy debate and discussion) .

From a communications perspective, we promote opportunities to hear from different team members on company updates and initiatives in our weekly standup meetings, where we frequently hear from 6+ individuals in a meeting that is attended by 100+.

We keep the team unified on our common annual and quarterly goals, which leverages their strengths and expertise and leads them to success. We encourage and support innovative and boundary-pushing projects that are both business-minded and creative. Utilizing mainstream communication and project management tools, we are continuously focused on improving our workflows and procedures to ensure we are continuously evolving and not remaining stagnant. Because we have multiple people ecosystems across the organization, we go the extra mile to assure team members do not become siloed in their thinking and work methodology.

We celebrate successes with a quarterly “Wins” meeting. Teams share their accomplishments, awards are given for professional excellence, collaboration, and values. We celebrate with a party, and we take the following day off as a wellness day.

Employees are reimbursed for family planning expenses (adoption, surrogacy, egg-freezing, or travel reimbursement for abortion care).

We partner with a gamifying fitness app. Employees participate in monthly challenges, and win prizes, or a charitable donation.

We have three photography/video studios with working kitchens where we prep recipes featured on our site. Our in-office staff enjoys the dishes after the shoots are complete.

Strong work boundaries are important to us. Meetings are held between 10AM-5PM, local time. This gives everyone a moment to start and end their day not in a meeting. And we set expectations so nobody feels they need to be “on” 24/7. We encourage standard communication between 9AM-6PM local time, Monday - Friday.

When the revenue team closes a deal of a certain size, they treat the office to an ice cream cake! What originally started off as an inside joke has since become an incentivizing mainstay that the team looks forward to (we also provide plenty of Lactaid!).