Out There: What happens when sisterhood fails
AKA the WTF Allbright edition
Community. The old-new gold rush (other than Greenland, yikes). Consumer brands, IP creators, coworking hubs, professional networks and solopreneurs are all building communities in fragmented online and IRL spaces. As more people work in an isolated way, we crave connection to likeminds. We have to build our support networks, and these communities play an important role in weaving our own social safety nets.
So what happens when one of these communities suddenly implodes?
Well folks, I’m living it. Allbright, the coworking space and women’s network that I’ve been part of for the last year, suddenly closed its doors yesterday. To say it’s a surprise is an understatement. After 6 years of ‘empowering women’, they’ve shuttered their doors in an abrupt and final way. It’s like I’ve been murdered on The Traitors. It feels a bit shocking. And it’s really made me think about:
Why does community matter so much now?
Why do some types of community, like women’s member clubs, seemingly not work?
And what happens when the spell of brand community suddenly breaks?
Let’s get into it.
Why community matters
For a growing number of people, the social and professional ties that once bound us together in common spaces, beliefs and cultural practices, have broken. Many of us now work alone, isolated. We have replaced workplaces with soul-shrivelling identikit industrial workhouses, perked up with white paint and plants, called them coworking spaces, and pay through the nose for the pleasure. We no longer attend religious services or have communal religious or cultural practices to shape the rhythm of our lives. We float through life, untethered to each other, beholden to screens.
Social connection – the structure, function and quality of our relationships – plays a critical role in our individual health, resilience and success in life. And we’re losing it. Particularly those who grew up on screens – they may be fluent in cores and find community online but struggle to connect IRL. With weak social connections, we lack what Richard Reeves terms ‘neededness’ – the way we make ourselves essential to our families and communities.
We crave connection. We’re highly social beings who thrive on it. But when it comes to forming it, we need ecosystems in place which allow us to talk to strike up new relationships. But because of a critical lack of government investment in public social infrastructure over the past 40 years, we no longer have the establishments in which to do so. Libraries, youth centres, adult education, community centres have closed at record rates, with nothing to replace them. Once we leave school or university, we are on our own.
Commercial community building has stepped in to fill a social void. Brands connect people through their shared love of a product or creative IP. Solopreneurs create niche special interest micro-communities connecting people with shared challenges. Coaching cohorts sub in for community support groups. These are often monetised by the owners for personal gain – an ecosystem of knowledge products to get you to the next level of enlightenment.
These communities can be brilliant, invaluable and life affirming. They can also be toxic af. On the face of it, women’s communities, where knowledge, experience, empathy and grace is freely shared, should work. But many have struggled to turn a profit. They work on paper, but not in reality. Why?
The paradox of women’s members clubs
Allbright sold itself as “the world’s largest collective of women in business, enabling ambition in all forms: whether it’s building the confidence to lead a team meeting, or becoming CEO of a leading company.” A place where women can connect, strengthen their leadership skills, and network with brands and organisations changing the future of work to include us. And that IS needed. That SHOULD be a thing that exists - there’s a cavernous gap in training and mentoring women to be leaders.
However, there’s long been controversy over women-only clubs. Some claim they entrench existing gender inequality, keeping women in spaces where they’re cheerleading each other but not tackling the harder work of holding patriarchal systems to account. To thrive in our careers, women need to be in the rooms with men, part of the decision-making process, not making our own and walling ourselves off.
What I saw in Allbright was that women want to connect with each other. When I first visited the space, it was buzzing and vibrant where hyped coworking spaces like Secondhome were dead. In those spaces were packs of freelancers, headphones in, working in isolation under industrial lighting. At Allbright, there was raucous laughter, energetic coffee chats and the swish of power suits – I was immediately in.
While I think the coaching provided by Allbright was excellent (thanks to super career coach Aimee Young), at Allbright and other women’s clubs, I did experience a confused purpose beyond ‘empowering women’. What does it mean? Does it mean a pastel colour palette, comfy chairs, showers with bougie products and fizzy rosé? Because that’s what it felt like at times – promoting a certain kind of womanhood.
In the Wing’s case, the millennial girlboss – with all the problems that come with that. Chief promised a She-E-O network for C-Suite execs – with a price tag of £7900/year for membership. Both have been in hot water, with claims of exclusion, bias and white feminism, with the Wing subsequently closing, and Chief closing its plush Bloomsbury club.
As everything does, it seems to come down to money and scalable business model. Allbright, like other clubs, has struggled to monetise their community in a structured, scalable way. The clubhouse was a beautiful space, with a reasonable monthly fee for coworking and free events. Lovely environment, great team, but soul is not scalable. And when you take on substantial investment, the backers aren’t in it for feel-good vibes.
In August 2024, they acquired Everywoman, a learning and development platform – with the ambition to reach women globally. It looks like the brand will continue by ditching the townhouse and focusing on scalable coaching and training programs. Allbright bought the community. Everywoman has the productised ecosystem and distribution. I’m willing to bet that Allbright itself will fade away, and Everywoman will become the dominant brand. Sisterhood works, but not when it comes to the bottom line.
A brand promise, broken
Earlier this week, I was in the club and it was buzzing as usual. Sure, the kitchen had been down for repair works, but that happens. I’ve worked in hospitality, I know ‘oh fuck’ moments happen and you roll with them. Thursday this week, the emails started.
Formal, cold, unreachable. The tone change felt like whiplash. Gone was the warmth, the cheerleader voice the brand is known for. Gone was the voice of the brand. The mask had been lifted. Here come the lawyers with their red pens. Here’s the dirty underbelly of investor deals laid bare in clipped tones – calculated, exacting, uncaring. And then the news - the club had closed its doors for the final time. A sneaky email rushed out at half five.
My Whatsapp and LinkedIn messages have been on fire since. Members in confusion, frantically checking their accounts and contracts to cancel our subscriptions. The email does go onto offer coworking at Old Sessions House, but that’s not what we signed up for. And we have no one to discuss it with. The phone lines have been cut. There’s only one email to contact. The operation has shut down, just like that. The terms and conditions on the website have not been updated to reflect that Old Sessions House is the new location. The contract has been materially broken.
The business strived to empower women, but ended by putting their team out of the job in a brutal, underhand way. Everything they’ve built, every experience, association, perception, all the goodwill they accrued because women believed in what they were doing, – that’s gone. The brand is a corpse. It’s dead.
Rumours are flying that they’ll bury Allbright as a trading business in a practice known as phoenixing. Wind up an entity in such a way so that you don’t have to pay off creditors like staff and contractors. Create a new clean entity to trade from. Switch brand name from Allbright to Everywoman, and begin trading off those associations instead. Let Allbright disappear, and carry on. Business in 2025. It can be brutal.
I’m still a little shocked by the whole thing. And saddened. Without the townhouse to ground us, I’ll likely lose touch with the many wonderful women I met there, the many serendipitous chats I had. It was a good community, and I will miss it. I’ll look for another community, and hopefully I’ll find something better. But right now, I feel untethered. A rickety boat, floating on choppy waters, drifting out to sea.
Bits and bobs
WTF is going on with Greenland? Here’s a primer:
https://time.com/7208293/buying-greenland-history/
Regional chinese eats on London’s side streets:
Anyone who knows me knows I LOVE chinese food. For as long as I can remember, the British experience has been an anglicised version of cantonese food from the provinces of Guangdong and Hong Kong. Now, you can get all kinds of street eats, like biang biang noodles from Xi’an, shengjianbao from Shanghai, jiaozi from Dalian, hot pot from Chongqing, and now even crossing-the-bridge noodles from Yunnan. A pimped up chicken soup with plenty of tactile delights, it’s a dish I’ve long been wanting to try. Look, I’m here for China’s soft culinary power, take all my money.
Let me know what you’ve spotted on your jaunts in the real world. Until next time, nerds!