Venue development studio
Your room can only ever be as busy as the reasons people have to come to it.
Most venues in London are running at the limit of the one reason they already give people, which is usually dinner. The room fills for two hours, empties, and the rest of the night belongs to somebody else.
We build the second reason. The brand, the music, the programme and the crowd that fill the hours your room is currently giving away, and then we hand the whole thing over to you and leave.
What we do
We work with owners who have a room that is nearly there. The location is fine, the food is fine, the space holds more people than it ever seems to have in it. What’s missing is a reason for anyone to feel like the place belongs to them.
That’s a brand problem before it’s an operations problem, so we start with the concept and build outwards from it. We name the thing, we decide what it stands for and who it’s for, we programme the music and the events that make it real, and we run the marketing and the community until there is an audience turning up because they want to rather than because they were advertised at. Along the way we bring in the brand partners who want to be in front of that audience, which is money your room cannot currently access because it doesn’t have one.
The physical work is usually small. Sound, lighting, a few decisions about how the room is used after nine. We are not architects and we won’t ask you to close for a refit.
We create destinations through culture.
Music is what we love, so it’s often the way in. It can as easily be food, art, fashion, or what’s in the glass.
MAYA
MAYA was the room beneath a restaurant on Wigmore Street. Thirty seated covers in a space that holds eighty standing, doing dinner and not much else, half full most nights and closing when the last table finished. The agave list was already one of the best in London and the room was still empty, because nobody had been given a reason to be in it.
We built MAYA as a music and hi-fi brand, put in a custom hand built hi-fi sound system and DJ equipment, and programmed over sixty nights across the year. Residents first, guests after. We built the identity, ran the marketing and the socials, and handled the community from the first night.
The first decision was where the night breaks. Dinner owned six to nine while the kitchen was running, and the standing crowd had the room from nine until close, with an hour of overlap built in on purpose so each group arrived into a room that already had people in it.
The room did not get bigger. It got a second reason.
Three nights a week the room filled every seat by eight and stayed standing until close. Dinner did not suffer for it. The people who came to eat now had a reason to stay rather than paying up and going somewhere else for the rest of their night. Most venues hand their customers to another bar at half nine without noticing they’re doing it.
The restaurant above felt it too, in the way a building does when one part of it starts being talked about. Food coverage came off the back of the MAYA brand rather than the other way round.
Before this
We each ran our own events company, Panther and Alfaia, and between us we’ve put on more than sixty productions. Both were built on unusual rooms and the production to match, which is why the partnership made sense.
Panther started in a members’ lounge above a Mayfair nightclub that had been fitted out properly and then never used, because the demand the owners expected never showed up. We approached them and ran it as a Friday residency through the summer, their quietest months. The room went from empty to occupied every week, and it cost the venue nothing beyond opening the door.
Andres did the same thing to a club that was closed on Thursdays. He reconfigured the room, booked a big DJ, and made the night work.
The rest was ours to build from scratch. A listed church turned into a three hundred and fifty person party, with the sound, lighting, projection and bar all run in-house. A Mayfair townhouse taken over room by room at two hundred pounds a ticket. Both sold out, both built on a community of five thousand people we grew without spending anything on advertising.
We take a venue for twelve months and we work for the owner.
Months one to six
The build
The first month is spent working out what your room is actually missing, which is not always what you think it is. We look at how the space gets used across a week, who comes and who doesn’t, what the building can hold that it currently isn’t holding, and where the night breaks. We agree with you at this point which four or five numbers we’ll both be looking at in a year, so that at the end of it there’s an honest answer to whether this worked.
Then we build the concept. The name, what it stands for, who it’s for, how it looks and how it sounds. Andres programmes the music, which for most rooms means finding residents before guests, because a room needs regulars behind the decks before it can have regulars in front of them.
We run the marketing, the social and the community from the first night through to month six. That means being the ones who know who’s in the room and who’s coming back, and it means the audience is built by hand rather than bought. Once there’s an audience worth their money, we bring in the brand partners who want to be in front of it.
Whatever the room needs physically, we’ll specify and manage. That’s usually sound, sometimes lighting, occasionally a change to how the space is laid out after nine. We’re not architects and we won’t ask you to close for a refit.
Months seven to twelve
Oversight
By month five you’ll have appointed someone internally who takes the brand and the community on, and the second half of the year is us handing it to them properly and then watching from a step back. Andres keeps programming the music, because that’s the part that quietly falls apart first when nobody’s minding it. We stay across the brand and the partnerships and we’re on hand when your team needs us.
Same standards, much less of us, and a fee that reflects it.
Month twelve
Then we leave
At the end of twelve months you own the brand, the name, the identity, the audience and the relationships. All of it. We go.
If you’d rather keep us on after that, we’ll scope it separately and price it separately, but the default is that we’re gone and the thing runs without us. We build for that from month one, because a concept that only works while we’re standing next to it isn’t worth what you paid for it.
Brand partners
£75,000
Sponsors don’t buy an audience, they buy a concept they can be seen next to, which means the money can come in before the doors open. It paid for the sound system and a large part of what we cost.
We build the partnership case into the concept from the first month. A brand deciding where next year’s budget goes is choosing between ideas, and the venues that get picked are the ones with something worth attaching to. Often the relationship already exists as a supply arrangement, and the work is turning a supplier into an investor.
Four a year.
We take on four venues a year, which is as many as we can do properly given how much of the first six months is us in the room.
If yours might be one of them, apply below and we’ll come and see the room. No pitch, no cost, just a conversation about what the space could be.