The Cafe 11 NFT features original art by John P. Dessereau.
There’s a new way to enjoy Hennessy with friends.
This month, the storied 257-year-old cognac maker will launch an NFT alongside web3 collective Friends With Benefits. The $450 non-fungible tokens go on sale to the public Nov. 4, and grant users access to Café 11, a new initiative aimed at cultivating a Hennessy community with a mix of online and offline events. Only 1765 (a reference to the year Hennessy was founded) tokens will be sold.
The inaugural Café 11 event kicks off Dec. 1, in Miami during Art Basel; token holders will be allowed into an immersive event that runs from 11 a.m to 11 p.m., and which will feature tastings, live music and other experiences. The concept is of a bustling Parisian café that transforms from a daytime salon into an evening speakeasy.
Friends With Benefits member John P. Dessereau created original illustrations for Cafe 11’s NFT.
Café 11 will be, in the words of Hennessy CEO Laurent Boillot, about “curiosity, community and culture.”
“What I like about it is the simple idea of Café 11,” Boillot says. The “eleven” in Café 11 is a reference to the cognac maker’s 11 a.m. daily tastings, where Hennessy’s team samples the eaux de vie which, with careful aging and a lot of patience, transform into cognac. “11 a.m. is a sacred time,” Boillot explains. “Then there was this idea of Paris and cafés. There is this energy and this vibration in the café where people are meeting, discussing and inventing the world.”
“It’s pretty amazing that a group of 3,500 internet friends get to collaborate with a brand of this caliber,” Gabe Quintela, Friends With Benefits Head of Partnerships, said. “In a lot of ways, FWB is a new social network. We are building new forms of connections that value intimacy over scale, that governs and sustains itself, and that can blur this line between digital and physical experiences.”
The project tapped FWB’s wide talent pool. As a DAO, or a decentralized autonomous organization, the collective operates without a traditional hierarchy and uses voting to pass resolutions. In the case of the Hennessy project, FWB took on the role of a creative agency, and asked members with relevant skills to collaborate. (The production costs were shared by Hennessy and FWB, and any resulting revenues will be split among the firms, executives said.)
The finished project features original art by John P. Dessereau, an artist whose illustrations have graced Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The Miami event, including a cocktail program, will be produced by Maxwell Britten, a highly respected spirits industry veteran who has done stints as Maison Premiere’s founding bar director as well as at Django, the swank jazz lounge at Manhattan’s Roxy Hotel. Joey Rubin, the founding partner at Parade Agency, handled creative direction.
Cafe 11’s name is a nod to the storied daily 11 a.m. eaux de vie tasting at Hennessy.
“That’s what’s so special about the DAO and the curation of what we do and the members we have,” FWB’s Gabe Quintela says. “We’re able to build this all-star team of individual talent. They get bundled together and activated under this umbrella of the DAO itself. In a lot of ways, it changes the future of work. It changes the way agencies or businesses will look going forward, if you think about the opportunities of who we bring together.”
A limited edition cultural passport, or loyalty card, which offers exclusive perks is not a new idea. An exclusive members-only club of like-minded fans is also a very familiar concept. A glitzy party, co-hosted with a brand, set in a glamorous locale and filled with convivial well-dressed guests, remains a stand-by marketing tool of consumer brands, especially within the luxury space.
Yet delivering the Café 11 digital membership via an NFT is still revolutionary, given that most brands, let alone famed French luxury names, are still skeptical of the promise of web3. To be sure, the headlines around speculation and hacks in the web3 space are not to be discounted. As a nod against the constant threat of hackers and bad actors, FWB tapped Zora, a web3 toolkit that authenticates, secures and audits smart contracts on the blockchain.
Hennessy, the nearly 300-year-old cognac maker, has launched a new NFT, Cafe 11, alongside web3 … [+]
Still, where some arched their eyebrows, Hennessy’s Boillot saw an opportunity to cultivate a new way of connecting with Hennessy fans. “I was very much involved in the web 2 world,” he says. “The team around me knows that I brought some elements from that time.” The medium may change, he notes, but basic business tenets are timeless. “It’s simply about how you engage your customers. It’s always the same. What doesn’t change is that you have to really understand your target.”
For years, Boillot has centered successful engagement initiatives around four ideas, originally borrowed from Google’s evangelists: education, entertainment, utility and collaboration. “Web3 is just another way to have this engagement, probably with stronger possibilities,” Boillot notes. Café 11 will have the four aspects of engagement built into it, from exclusive parties to brand messaging. (More events and offers will follow the Dec. 1 party, but details have not yet been announced.)
That said, there was some early pushback to the concept, even among those in the company. Founded in 1765, Hennessy is, after all, just a few years older than America itself, and there was concern of damaging the brand value. “We can have some moments of experimentation and learning, and for sure, mistakes,” Boillot says. “But the one thing I want to avoid is to damage the Hennessy brand. That’s something I’m always asking myself: Is that right for the equity of Hennessy?”
The swirl of speculation that surrounds the NFT and crypto space, as well as environmental issues, remain a concern as brands tiptoe into web3’s brave new world. Brands who make physical things, such as, say, actual bottles with spirits that are meant to be sipped in person, are still wrestling with the idea of how to make it all work. Some spirits markers are experimenting with using NFTs to authenticate rare bottles, while others are using playful immersive experiences that double as this generation’s version of a Times Square billboard.
“Every time I see that it could be something about speculation, I’m super resistant,” Hennessy’s chief executive says. “I don’t want to see my NFTs in OpenSea with the value going down and down.” He also notes that his business, after all, centers around physical objects. “We are, in fact, selling 100 million bottles on a yearly basis, which is quite the amount of revenue. I’m not expecting that overnight web3 and metaverse will make numbers better than this. This is really much more about experimentation.”
Boillot adds that the project isn’t about offering a web3 project merely for the sake of a tech trend. “I really consider this, before everything, just a door to access people in communities that we have something in common with,” he adds. “I think that web3 communities and the DAOs can help with that.”
That said, this NFT project, for all its ephemeral tech, had to include a way for real people to taste real cognac, Hennessy’s chief executive stressed.
“The future will be the same: bridges between those two worlds,” he says. And there will be a future, he says, because just like a friendship, the partnership will evolve into new experiences.
