Hi all,
It’s Wednesday, 6.37am, just wrote this last line to send you this new letter by being a day late… To be honest, I was not fully convinced with the topic I was supposed to share with you and had to come back to some conversations I had last week.
And I had this wonderful discussion with one of my friend, talking about simplicity…
And we tried to bring some in the LOBBY world with LOBBY Town & LOBBY Studio
A founder starts with a simple idea. A café. A restaurant. A hotel. A bakery. Something clear, something solid. Then slowly, because clarity apparently feels too naked these days, the idea starts collecting accessories.
Now it’s not just a café. It’s a café-bookshop-flower-studio-community-space with a small retail corner, occasional dinners, morning runs, a playlist on Spotify, and a founder statement that sounds like the last scientist born in Brittany
I’m exaggerating a little.
But not that much.
And I understand why it happens. Simplicity is scary. When an idea is simple, it can be judged quickly. It’s exposed. People understand it immediately, which means they can also reject it immediately. Complexity feels safer. If the concept is dense enough, layered enough, wrapped in enough words, maybe nobody will notice the conviction is still missing.
But guests are not stupid. They can feel confusion very fast.
Not because they need everything to be basic. Because they need to know what the place is asking them to do. Sit, stay, eat, grab, meet, celebrate, work, disappear, come back. The clearer that invitation is, the stronger the place becomes.
The more places I visit, the more I believe this: the best concepts are usually not the most original on paper but they are the most coherent in real life.
And coherence rarely comes from adding more.
In the full version, I want to go deeper into this, because I think a lot of founders are suffering from concept anxiety. They keep layering things because they haven’t decided what the place really is. And that indecision ends up everywhere: in the menu, in the service, in the atmosphere, and eventually in the guest experience.
