Hi all,
Hope you’re doing well!
Its been a busy month at LOBBY & Late Checkout.
As some of you probably saw on Instagram, we are launching few projects in the upcoming weeks:
- Land for Land (A crafted outdoor house for sport, nature and slow living) —> The official website will be live by next week
- Autofficina (A mid-century house collection and auto-inspired brand built for design lovers who collect homes like they collect cars)
- Frank’s Market (Yes, back with a coffee shop in Brittany, but not like any others…)
Actually, once this letter is sent, I’ll go back to do some paint
- Cooper’s Office (It goes with Frank’s Market but we renovated the house next door to do LOBBY’s new office and few offices for our friends…)
So the question, with all of this projects. How do you tease them before you open (with a small amount of money too…)
And I had this discussion the other day about the fact that a lot of founders wait too long before talking about their project.
We wait for the money.
We wait for the keys.
We wait for the final logo.
We wait for the renders.
We wait for the proper moment.
And I get it. Nobody wants to look amateur. Nobody wants to announce something too early and then spend the next six months answering, So… is it open yet? while silently crying into a spreadsheet (I had this case with Autofficina…)
But I think we often misunderstand what teasing a project means.
It doesn’t mean pretending the place already exists.
It doesn’t mean posting mysterious black-and-white photos with captions like soon and hoping people emotionally invest in a door handle.
It means starting to create a bit of gravity around why you started this project.
Before you have walls, before you have a budget, before you have the final name, you can already make people feel where the project is going. You can share the intention. The world. The problem you’re trying to solve. The people you want to gather. The references that shaped you. The feeling you want to protect.
We don’t need money to start that.
We need taste, consistency, and a bit of nerve.
Because a project doesn’t start when construction starts. We all know that a project starts when people begin to understand why it should exist.
That’s what I want to talk about this week: the simple tools I would use to tease a project with almost no money.
Not to create fake hype. Please no. We have enough empty hype in hospitality.
But to create belief.
And belief is usually the first real currency of a place.
