IT company Ignition welcomes employees to doodle on their office walls.

In their general manager’s office, boardroom and in the hallway, too.

With an innovative new product called IdeaPaint, a specialised paint that turns any paintable surface into a high functioning dry erase board, Ignition has turned several of its office walls into floor-to-ceiling brainstorming spaces.

The idea to go big with their white board space came from general manager Michael Branco, who had worked in Chicago where his office had a ‘war room’ with four walls of white board.

“We could brainstorm throughout the entire room,” he said.

When his company recently expanded their office space in February, taking over a new portion of the first floor in the Wessex House on Reid Street, Mr Branco knew what he wanted.

They already had a white board in their old space but it was actual wallpaper that was shipped in from Toronto.

“Between the shipping and the installation, it was a pain,” said Mr Branco. “I wanted something that was edge to edge. To be able to develop complex technology solutions, we need big walls to do it.”

The full-service IT company with 24 employees locally, offers management services, cloud services, core tech ability and regular hardware and software procurement.

They ‘Googled’ different white board options and found IdeaPaint. Lucky for them, Bermudian entrepreneur Nick Duffy in August started Bermuda IdeaPaint, which is the sole distributor of the product on the Island.

Now Ignition has dry erase walls in their boardroom, two offices and a common hallway for employees to jot down ideas and brainstorm. Their boardroom’s IdeaPaint wall doubles as a projector screen.

It has been about a month since the installation and so far, the writing is on the wall.

“It’s been great, from brainstorming to technology architecture and solution building, it’s been going well,” he said, adding he was surprised that it was available locally. “We were moving quickly and if it hadn’t been already available on the Island, we probably wouldn’t have done it.”

According to Mr Duffy, this is his first commercial installation of IdeaPaint in Bermuda having completed several walls for schools around the Island.

“We have painted almost 400 square feet of walls with Ideapaint including a conference room and the general manager’s office and a dynamic common wall allowing collaboration between the staff on a very large scale,” said Mr Duffy. “It is a very impressive installation and reflects the dynamics of an innovative IT company.”

Mr Duffy has seen an uptick in interest from commercial clients and has several more installations in the works.

“It’s such a brilliant, clever product it’s so simple and solves a lot of problems in a very simple way,” he said.