SEAFORD — A shopping center once symbolic of Seaford’s economic heyday and subsequent decline is beginning a new chapter as The Mill opens its third coworking space in Delaware.
The Mill founder Rob Herrera officially opened the coworking and business incubator on Wednesday afternoon in Seaford. It was a celebration of the transformation of what once was a local supermarket into a new mixed-use campus. Herrera was gifted a cowboy hat and a bottle of Harvest Ridge Winery’s Blue Hen Blue by Rep. Danny Short (R-Seaford) to commemorate the occasion.
“My whole career has been about taking something kind of dilapidated, underutilized [and] reinvigorating it in an exciting way. . . it’s transformative,” Hererra said during the event.
The Mill is the latest milestone in the $60 million redevelopment of the former Nylon Capital Shopping Center, now named simply – Nylon Capital Center. Herrera bought the 280,000 square-foot shopping center in 2022 after eyeing it for a while. At the time, the shopping center was estimated to be 15% occupied.
The campus will also include Delaware Technical Community College’s workforce training center, TidalHealth, Community Bank Delaware, BrightBloom Centers and Vanderwende’s Farm Creamery with additional commercial and retail tenants expected as redevelopment continues.
Hererra’s coworking space is another new element taking shape in the center. State and local officials, business leaders and community members gathered to celebrate the ribbon cutting on Monday for the new endeavor, a project supporters say is intended to become more than shared office space.
The Mill traces its roots to Wilmington where it opened in 2016 after DuPont’s corporate restructuring left significant office vacancies and highlighted the need for new economic drivers.
What began as a coworking space in the former Nemours Building evolved into one of Delaware’s largest entrepreneurial communities, providing flexible workspace, business programming and networking opportunities for hundreds of startups, nonprofits and established companies.
Herrera said The Mill’s Wilmington location has grown into a community of more than 400 professionals, a model he hopes to replicate in Seaford.
The company also opened a second location in Concord in 2016.
“I’ve honestly built my entire career around this business model,” he continued. “I’ve watched entrepreneurs meet their future business partners. I’ve watched companies grow from a single desk into businesses worth more than $100 million. I’ve watched founders take the biggest leap in their lives and build something extraordinary. . . That’s what coworking is really all about. . . Yes, we lease offices. Yes, we lease memberships. But what we’re really building is a community.”
The Seaford location offers a mix of flexible workspaces designed for entrepreneurs, remote workers and growing businesses. The facility includes private furnished offices, dedicated desks, reservable hot desks, shared conference rooms and Zoom rooms, along with a podcasting suite equipped for content creation.
A large common area and café-style workspace serves as the hub for members, while an event space and pantry are designed to host networking events, chamber gatherings and other business functions. Members also have access to high-speed fiber internet, mail services, lockers, outdoor Wi-Fi-enabled courtyards and collaborative spaces intended to encourage connections among tenants and the broader business community.
“This site represented so much,” former Gov. John Carney, now mayor of Wilmington, said during the ceremony. Hererra lauded Carney’s involvement in the project, along with others, as a catalyst to its success.
Carney said efforts to redevelop the property stretched back years before the project finally came together through partnerships among state officials, local leaders and private developers. When he was governor, he allocated $20 million of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to the Nylon Capital Center.
The project also fulfills a broader vision Carney said he held while serving as governor: bringing The Mill’s collaborative workspace model beyond Wilmington into each of Delaware’s three counties.
“My hope and prayer is that this building becomes more than a coworking space,” Hererra said. “I hope it becomes a catalyst for a new generation of entrepreneurs, a gathering place for this community and one small piece of a much larger resurgence here in western Sussex County.”