Work
MAYA
What the room was
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.
What we did
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.
Where it got to
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 an events company. Panther and Alfaia have put on around fifty events between them, in nightclubs, a listed church, a Georgian townhouse, a hotel, a co-working space and on rooftops. Between the two brands we’ve built a following of about eight thousand across our mailing lists, Instagram and WhatsApp groups, and we’ve never spent anything on marketing to get there. We’ve never raised or spent outside money on any of it.
Panther
Panther started in a members’ lounge above a Mayfair nightclub. The room had been fitted out properly and then sat unused, because the demand the owners expected never arrived. We approached them and ran ten Fridays through the summer, which is their quietest stretch of the year. The room went from empty to occupied every week and it cost the venue nothing beyond opening the door.
The Mansion is a Georgian townhouse over four floors that was empty when we found it. We fitted out the whole building, floor by floor, with theming, decoration and lighting built for each event. We ran six there and all six sold out, at an average of a hundred pounds a ticket. The Halloween one had over three hundred and fifty people in it, did twenty thousand pounds of tickets and the same again over the bar.
A Chelsea nightclub had just opened and needed a reason for people to pick it over everywhere else in its first few months. We built a rock and roll night around seventies hedonism, which nothing else in the area was running. Live guitarist, three events, a queue round the block, and one table that spent over fifteen thousand pounds in a night.
Alfaia
The Conduit was a co-working space with a casual bar and had never run a club night. Andres built one, with custom lighting and a sound system brought in for the night. It sold out and took ten thousand pounds over the bar in a room that had never been used that way.
A Mayfair nightclub that closes on Thursdays. Andres took the main room, which runs open format and hip hop the rest of the week, programmed it as house and booked Xinobi to headline.
Together
A listed church turned into a three hundred and fifty person party, with sound, lighting, projection and bar all run in-house.
A room at the Mandrake Hotel that nobody was using, draped in red fabric with a sound installation put in for the night. The Mansion was ours jointly as well, so we were working together for a while before Mungo & Mijares existed.
Around fifty events across two companies. We came up with every concept, built every production, sold the tickets and grew the crowd, and we did it without outside money. That’s the experience we brought to MAYA, and it’s what we bring to a venue now.