There is a co-working space in the Pearl I walk past on the way to Ovation, and for seven weeks now the lights have been on and nobody has been inside. Same long communal table. Same eleven identical black chairs. Same neon script on the brick, telling an empty room to do what it loves.
I stood at that window longer than a normal person would.
Because that room is the cleanest brand case study I know, and it got easier to read the moment the people left it.
Strip a co-working company down to what it sells and you have square footage, a chair, wifi, and coffee that is fine. Every operator in the category buys from the same catalog and signs roughly the same lease.
When the product is identical, brand is not the decoration on top of the offer, brand is the entire offer.
Which is why the category split the way it did. WeWork sold identity: you are a founder, you are part of something, here is a beer tap and a community manager and a vocabulary where you are a member instead of a tenant. Industrious sold professionalism: quiet, adult, a lobby you could bring a client into without explaining the neon. Same desk. Opposite promises. Different customers, different churn.
Identity is the more powerful position and the more expensive one to hold, because identity brands take on debt. WeWork told a story so large it stopped describing a real estate company, and when the filing landed last fall the distance between the story and the ledger became the only thing anyone talked about. Industrious promised something smaller, and smaller promises are survivable.
Now every desk in the category is empty at once, and the promises are being audited in public.
Here is what I would tell an operator this week. A membership is a habit wrapped around a belief, and only one of those survives a closed door. The habit is gone. Nobody is commuting to your lobby. What is left is whether the member believed the thing you sold them, and whether you are still acting like it while collecting nothing.
A membership is a habit wrapped around a belief, and only one of those survives a closed door.
The operators I would bet on are the ones whose promise was never really about the room. If you sold access to people, you can still convene people. If all you sold was a nice chair near a window, you are in the furniture business and the furniture is closed.
My karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March. Sticky floor, terrible lighting, a host who calls everyone baby and means it. I would hand over the cover charge tonight for a room I am not allowed to enter, which tells you exactly what I was buying, and it was never the floor.