Fraternities, Not Private Clubs
Embracing the Greek Life Analogy
When we first launched Maxwell I was scared of the stereotypes & analogies we might evoke. There were so many potholes our narrative could hit — if we said it was like a secular synagogue someone might go “so you’re like a cult?!” I hated answering the questions about how no, our private club was not like Anna Delvey’s art foundation, thank you very much!
But no fear ranked higher than the one of being pegged as “overgrown frat boys.”
So I avoided all analogies that could be possibly link us to college Greek life. I thought it was the kiss of death for attracting the type of down to earth, intelligent and conscientious people we wanted to have as members, and to growing a serious organization that we hoped one day would scale worldwide.
So we stuck to private club analogies. We were the REAL private club, not like these gated restaurants or glorified co-working spaces. Private clubs how they USED to be, back in the day, but without the racism and sexism and antisemitism and without, without . . . etc.
When someone bothered to listen long enough they got it, but we realized that the vast majority of our members and people we wanted as members considered the private club scene in NYC to be unbelievably douchey, so “like a private club, but not douchey” was a real uphill battle — most people just tuned us out the minute we said private club.
In addition, investors HATED it — the MOST successful private club was so financially unsuccessful that its brief public debut is likely ending soon with Soho House being taken private due to the sad fact it hasn’t made a profit in 30+ years. We’ve written at length what bad business models these clubs are — combining hotels, restaurants, gyms, memberships, bars, spas, etc. all under one roof and expecting to excel at all of them when many of them have direct conflicts of interest, yet we kept on starting the analogies for what we were doing from this place of weakness. “Yes we’re doing this shitty business model, but . . . NOT shitty!”
So I started lightly testing out comparing what we’re doing to college fraternities, sororities and adult fraternal orders, and I was pleasantly surprised — people finally “got it.”
I’d start by being like “look, I realize this can come off the wrong way but it’s kind of like an adult fraternity, a Princeton eating club or a Harvard finals club” and wait to see their reaction.
Every single time I’d get a chuckle and then someone telling me what positive experiences they had in college, how they so miss it and that was EXACTLY what they were looking for again. Weren’t we all?
Everyone was always very aware of the negatives of college Greek life, but you could love your experience while also rolling your eyes at the excesses.
Investors also started to get it — while many of them weren’t intimately familiar with the original “adult fraternities” — Rotarians, Kiwanis, Elks, Moose, etc. they could understand that they definitely were NOT private members clubs with bothersome, low margin, high cost restaurants attached. And there are STILL 45,000 Rotary clubs in the world! Yes, literally. One of these clubs has 45,000 locations worldwide, despite being wildly unattractive to anyone under 60.
So while it wasn’t necessarily a POSITIVE analogy for investors right off the bat, it was more of a neutral one and we weren’t working to combat preexisting negative prejudices — investors were more pleasantly surprised that this model they hadn’t really paid attention to or known much about turned out to be HIGHLY scalable. It’s better to be refreshing a functional & scalable but outdated & unknown model (“your grandfather’s fraternal order") than trying to reeducate people on a model they KNOW they don’t like (“douchey private clubs”).
In retrospect our biggest miscalculation was thinking that being associated with college Greek life was worse for us than being associated with private clubs.
It turns out many, many, many people have extremely positive experiences in fraternities and sororities in college.
Almost NO ONE has had genuinely positive experiences with private members clubs.
In retrospect this was obvious — in our first couple years of operations I don’t think ONE person went “so it’s like a college frat, ew” it was mostly “Not a fan of Soho House, how are you different than Soho House?” We should have been listening to the negative associations being leveled at us way earlier and stopped accepting the “private club” frame of reference.
Since then we’ve realized that by staking out a radical position — “we’re building an adult (co-ed) fraternity” it has jolted people into actually paying attention and evaluating what we were doing more from first principals.
And for the much greater than expected slice of the population that has no problem admitting that they had a great time being part of those types of orgs in college, it resonates much more deeply.
So if you want to join an adult (co-ed) fraternity, applications are open for Spring ‘25 and we’d love to hear from you!
And as always, follow along on Instagram for regular updates!
David, Kyle & Joelle
This is fantastic! Happy to be a founding supporter of it.