Amazon Kept HQ2 Under Wraps Using These Code Names
Amazon Kept HQ2 Under Wraps Using These Code Names
The competition to land
Amazon.com
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HQ2 operations was dog eat dog in more ways than one.
When the Seattle-based company assigned code names to the 20 finalists selected from an initial field of 238 cities, it looked to the dogs of Amazon employees, according to a person familiar with the matter.
New York City’s winning proposal was named Project Clancy. The bid from Maryland’s Montgomery County was Project Duke. Philadelphia’s was collared as Bailey. Indianapolis heard its proposal would be known as Hazel.
“We were like, whose daughter is this, whose grandmother?” said Maureen Kraus, chief economic development officer at the Indy Chamber, which spearheaded the Indianapolis region’s bid. No one on her team asked Amazon because they had more important questions, she said.
Amazon declined to comment Friday.
A dog park provided by Amazon adjacent to the Amazon Spheres, a company building, in Seattle in January.
Photo:
Paul Christian Gordon/Zuma Press
Northern Virginia, which officially learned Tuesday it would split the second headquarters with New York City, got the moniker Project Cooper. Local officials didn’t pause to ponder the name’s origin, said Stephen Moret, chief executive of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
“We were focused on what do we do next,” he said.
Big merger-and-acquisition deals routinely have code names to ensure secrecy during negotiations, and so do economic development projects. Mr. Moret called them “one little joyful thing in economic development.”
New York and Arlington, Va., traded billions of dollars in incentives for a shiny new Amazon HQ2. But the arrival of the new corporate headquarters could mean some serious challenges for the two cities.
Amazon’s search for a second headquarters had sparked a nationwide competition among cities for 14 months and ended with the decision to set up two, each with 25,000 employees and the promise of billions of dollars in investments.
Dogs were a fitting choice. Amazon employees are allowed to bring their dogs to work. The Seattle office has treats for them and places for them to run and play. When the Amazon website was plagued by outages in July, users got a screen saying, “Sorry, something went wrong on our end,” with a picture of one of the “dogs of Amazon.”
Some cities learned their dog names in January, when Amazon sent them their RFI, or Request for Information document.
Raleigh’s bid began as Project Sam but changed early on to Project Smith. Local officials said no reason was given, and they weren’t aware Amazon used dog names.
The Indy Chamber didn’t stick with Project Hazel internally. Ms. Kraus said she thought Hazel was the name assigned to all of the Amazon finalists and worried a leak about “Hazel” could tip off competitors in other cities. Out of an abundance of caution, the Indy Chamber’s creative agency renamed its HQ2 project Wolverine.
Amazon employees and an Amazon dog waited under company-provided umbrellas for lunch at a food truck in Seattle, in an October 2017 photo.
Photo:
Elaine Thompson/Associated Press
The fierce-sounding name was close to Ms. Kraus’s heart, as a University of Michigan graduate. She had no problem with Hazel, she says, and thinks it made perfect sense for Amazon to pick a canine cast.
On a visit to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, she was struck by the dog-friendly vibe. “When you walk in, you’re like, this is a dog culture. And it’s great, as long as you like dogs, which we do,” she said.
—Jimmy Vielkind and Valerie Bauerlein contributed to this article.
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