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 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
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.
Alfaia
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.
