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The parent company behind Soho House, the global chain of members-only clubs, put months of speculation to rest Monday by officially filing plans to go public.
The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the name Membership Collective Group and symbol “MCG,” according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. While the filing indicates plans to raise as much as $100 million in the process, that figure is typically a placeholder on initial public offerings. There was no mention of how many shares would be offered.
Soho House founder Nick Jones indicated the IPO would help with further growth for the company, which has 30 clubs around the world, according to the company website.
“After 25 years, we now find ourselves in the position of being a global platform for our memberships. I’m incredibly proud of how we’ve grown memberships for social, work, and retail under Soho House, and have evolved our platforms to create new opportunities for our existing members, as well as potential new members,” Jones wrote in a letter included in the SEC filing. “We will continue to open physical Houses — expanding our footprint across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa — and launch new types of membership that can be scaled globally.”
Jones also indicated plans for a digital-only platform for the company.
Despite the pandemic leading to temporarily suspended operations at many of its clubs and layoffs of 1,000 staffers, Soho House was also somewhat of a resilient entity. Only about 10 percent of the company’s 110,000 members cancelled their memberships during the public health crisis.
This isn’t Soho House’s first attempt at an IPO: The London-based members club ended plans to go public in 2018, when the company was then valued at $2 billion.
The company confidentially filed paperwork earlier this year with the SEC that could ultimately value the company as high as $4 billion, Sky News reported in April.
This latest advancement toward going public comes as summer leisure travel demand is expected to rapidly accelerate in many parts of the world. But analysts expect additional demand toward more exclusive entities like a Soho House.
“More and more companies and groups are very eager to explore and expand the membership concept. It’s all been fueled by the pandemic and how that has impacted how we live, work, and play,” Gilda Perez-Alvarado, global CEO of JLL Hotels & Hospitality, told Skift earlier this year. “Maybe you travel to a certain city where there’s an exclusive space you can stay that’s giving you a more residential and very personal approach service. That’s the winning formula going forward.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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