Soho House and the messy business of quality control
It all comes back to frozen yogurt.
Crisis of Cool
There’s a joke from The Good Place, the nigh-perfect and now-ended TV comedy about heaven and hell, that I still think about all the time.
Frozen yogurt in The Good Place is the low-level bane of Kristen Bell’s afterlife. Her character winds up in heaven by mistake, after a short life as a selfish dirtbag, and finds it populated by froyo shops selling the always-disappointing treat. Finally, she asks Ted Danson’s managing angel why his heaven went all-in on the low-calorie imitation of ice cream, instead of embracing the real, full-fat, full-flavor thing.
To which he replies: “There's something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little, so you can have more of it.”
It’s a pretty enduring metaphor! Especially in our late-stage-capitalist economy, in which growth all too often equals trying to make more of a thing—usually without thinking through all of the consequences of scaling up.
“Ruining it a little so you can have more of it” is an especially thorny problem for luxury companies and other businesses that promise customers a certain level of restraint. Which brings me to Soho House, the subject of my most recent story for Fortune, and the tricky challenge of defining and controlling “quality” at a business that’s selling a vibe and a community as much as its services.
Soho House, a relatively small but closely-watched company, runs a global chain of private, members-only clubs for what it calls “creatives.” It’s almost 30 years old, with 43 locations in London and New York and Los Angeles and other global-jetset destinations, and an impressive track record of early-aughts pop-culture cred: Gawker parties, Sex and the City cameos, Meghan Markle’s first dates with Prince Harry.
But for all of its fame, Soho House has never made a fortune. It’s lost money, every single year, for almost three decades. And, since Soho House’s investors made the dubious choice to take the company public in 2021, it now has to provide regular, public updates about just how much money it’s losing, and how much deeper in debt it’s becoming, while it continues trying to open more and more club locations around the globe.
“I hope we get given the opportunity to show that we can continue doing what we do really well—and then deliver on the profitability,” Soho House CEO Andrew Carnie, who’s been in the top job for 18 months, told me last week in London.
His carefully twinned goals hint at the larger challenge facing Carnie and his company. Soho House would probably have an easier time making money in the short term if it were less worried about “continuing to do what we do really well.” But as its CEO is well aware, he’s in the business of selling something fragile. As I wrote for Fortune:
As Carnie tries to bring Soho House’s spending and debt load in line, he also has to reckon with the thornier—and less measurable—recent damage to its public perception. The recent financial scrutiny has led to international headlines debating whether or not Soho House is indeed still “cool”—or if its yearslong push for growth has threatened its not-for-everyone core appeal. So is it possible to expand—at least as aggressively as Soho House has—while still remaining exclusive and aspirational?
It’s a complicated question for any organization to answer, but especially for a company in the business of selling community and access to like-minded people. “Quality control” is an uncomfortable term here; “the right kind of people” carries all sorts of ugly implications.
And Soho House, to its credit, seems to be trying hard to be thoughtful about its community, in a way that so many “members-only clubs” don’t even pretend to bother with. (King Charles and, more distressingly, onetime Mr. Darcy actor Mathew Macfadyen are members of London’s men-only Garrick Club, founded in 1831 and still clinging to its “no girls allowed” treehouse signs. Across the Atlantic, Augusta National Golf Club finally let ladies join a decade ago, and now has at least seven—seven!—known women among its 300 members.)
Carnie argues that Soho House is “inclusive, we’re not exclusive,” and many of his customers agreed with him—to a point. “The space is beautiful, the pool is amazing,” Christina Blacken, a 36-year-old Black entrepreneur and Soho House member in Brooklyn, told me. “And they’re bringing in a more diverse, creative, and interesting group of people into the community.”
Yet other fans of the same Soho House location in Brooklyn worry about how its carefully-chosen individual community may be diluted—perhaps even “ruined”?—by the larger and ever-expanding company.
“People used to say that Dumbo House was the Black house, and I say that proudly,” one founding member of that club, who is also Black, told me. “But then what started to happen was that your Soho House members from Manhattan, and some of your bridge-and-tunnels from New Jersey—that population started to come over.”
So it would be easy to mock Soho House. It can cost more than $5000 a year to belong, if you want access to all of its clubs, and that only gets you in the door—it doesn’t cover the (middling to good) food or the $22 cocktails or the cost of staying in one of its hotel rooms. And for all that, this company hasn’t been able to make any money in almost 30 years??
But I’ve genuinely enjoyed most of the time I spent at Soho House’s locations, as have many of the customers I interviewed for this article. I get why people who can afford it and who live or work near its locations spend that money. And I don’t underestimate the thorniness of the challenges Carnie and his company are facing, as they continue trying to make more of a good thing—without turning it into the private-club equivalent of frozen yogurt.
Lady Bits, London edition
Luck Be a Lady I finally saw the Bridge Theatre’s much-praised, semi-immersive revival of Guys & Dolls, which was delightful. I can’t remember the last time my cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much. And for as creaky and dated as the 1950 plot can be, the terrific performances highlighted just how well Frank Loesser’s music and lyrics hold up.
Charlotte Brontë, Toxic Girlboss? Anne Brontë, baby sister to Charlotte and Emily, wrote the most interesting Brontë novel. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a groundbreaking feminist story about a Victorian woman who leaves her abusive, alcoholic husband, was an instant success when Anne published it in 1848. But after she died a year later, at age 29, Charlotte prevented Anne’s book from being republished, undermining her sister’s lasting place in literary history. That difficult truth about the Jane Eyre genius and her complicated relationships with her sisters is at the heart of Sarah Gordon’s Underdog: The Other Other Brontë, another play I’m glad to have seen in London. I thought the script could have used one more edit to tighten its focus, but it was still sharply funny in its portrayal of Charlotte Brontë as an ambitious, talented woman who faced incredible misogyny in her career—and who used that systemic bias as an excuse to be selfish and monstrous to other women, including those she loved.
Express Yourself Also filed under “glad I saw it; wish it had a stronger editor”: The new Tate Modern exhibit on the Expressionist artist Wassily Kandinsky; his lesser-known partner, the artist Gabriele Münter; and their contemporaries in the early 20th century Blue Rider movement. As that lengthy description (and only slightly-shorter exhibit name) indicates, it felt like two and a half potential shows jumbled together, and I wanted the curators to pick a narrower focus. But it’s still worth seeing for the many stunning paintings, including those by Münter and other talented women artists.