Jostens joins Minneapolis office space downsizing trend

School ring maker, yearbook, and school photography company Jostens has become the latest corporation to join the office downsizing trend, announcing Wednesday it will sublease two of its three floors of headquarters space in a Bloomington, Minnesota, building, according to the Star Tribune.

Jostens, which has been in the Minnesota Center building since 2018, has hired Monarch CRE to sublease its fifth and sixth floors, a space totaling 35,000 square feet off France Avenue and Interstate 494.

“From the beginning of [the] pandemic to now, we’ve gone to a hybrid work model that has been very effective in supporting our growth,” Jostens chief human resource officer Florie Ellwein said in a statement. “… We [have] increased remote workers and embraced the digital age.”

Jostens now has 250 hybrid workers in Bloomington, according to the Star Tribune. It has 11 other locations, including three outside the United States.

According to the Star Tribune, Jostens’ relatively small downsizing is following a similar trend of “a fleet of corporations have taken in recent weeks and months.” Most recently, Wells Fargo said it will sell its massive home mortgage campus in south Minneapolis as it consolidates its Twin Cities workers at other metro-area buildings.

The Jostens deal is the second school photography-related office-size reduction in the past year. In February 2022, Tempus Realty Partners, an Arkansas-based real estate investment partnership, announced the recent purchase of a 259,000-square-foot former Lifetouch National School Studios campus located at 11000 Viking Drive in Eden Prairie, MN, for $23.4 million. The building serves as the corporate headquarters for Lifetouch, which Shutterfly bought for $825 million in 2018, and houses marketing and merchandising functions for both Lifetouch and Shutterfly, according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. The property consists of a four-story “West Building,” built in 1997, and a five-story “East Building,” built in 2004, both of which are connected by a two-story linking building. Shutterfly and Lifetouch will continue to occupy the East Building; Shutterfly also has a corporate campus in Shakopee, Minn.