By Denis Sheehan, Publisher, H&C News: Flyfish Club has fundamentally changed the restaurant world.
Next year New York will see the opening of Flyfish Club in Manhattan, which will fundamentally change the restaurant world, and to some degree already has.
Quite some claim, why open with such a seemingly impossible statement to justify, surely if the restaurant world was imminently set to substantially change, we would all know about it, maybe not, it all depends on your interest in all things metaverse.
Here goes…
Warning: This is relatively complicated but, the end result being – Flyfish Club Pre-opening membership has already sold out generating £21 million for the owners through the sale of 3,035 NFT’s to 1,038 members – hopefully will justify your further reading time.
After mentioning metaverse, the Flyfish Club will be a real restaurant and will not exist in the metaverse, at least no plans to have been announced yet to co-exist in the metaverse.
Membership will be the only way to eat and drink at Flyfish Club and membership can only be paid for via blockchain, in Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFT’s), Ethereum to be precise. Blockchain and NFT’s being a metaverse transaction process methodology and Ethereum (ETH) a metaverse currency.
Demand for Flyfish Club NFT’s is so high that they are now trading on Opensea, the world’s first and largest NFT marketplace. You can track the market price of all NFT’s on nft-stats.com, and that includes Flyfish Club NFT’s.
The owner of the membership NFT is also exclusively able to apply to attend special Flyfish Club events, cocktail parties, cooking demonstrations, wine tastings, and many others.
The owners of Flyfish Club include Gary Vaynerchuk, who also owns VaynerX a digital marketing agency with a client list that reads like a who’s who of global brands.
Vaynerchuk started building his business empire in the late 90’s being an early adopter of email marketing and Google AdWords. Through a strategy he labelled “under-priced attention” he transformed a modest local New Jersey family wine business into a $60 million a year online sales sensation.
The advent of social media in the mid/late 00’s saw Vaynerchuk as an Angel investor buying shares in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, Snap and Venmo. He then also used them extensively deploying his “under-priced attention” strategy again to further build many of his own and his client’s businesses.
Today he can look back at all the key moments in digital marketing over the past 25 years and say he was an innovator/early adopter in all of them.
He was recently named on the Fortune list of the Top 50 Influential people in the NFT industry.
The track record of Gary Vaynerchuk’s ability to predict technology product life cycles is unquestionable. He is now to use one of his favourite phrases “going all in” on the metaverse. Flyfish Club is undoubtedly part of that strategy.
So, what does all this offer the hospitality industry?
Hope, that after two plus years struggling through the pandemic, maybe just maybe, NFT’s and the wider metaverse will help businesses to diversify their customer propositions.
Some good news is that this is already happening with Adam Handling Restaurant Group having released London’s first NFT cocktail collection at Eve’s Bar, and just like Flyfish Club they are available on Opensea.
The events, cocktail parties, cooking demonstrations, wine tastings, and more on offer to owners of Flyfish Club NFT’s is a concept that could be replicated by all already in the business of providing such services. Or indeed diversifying into them.
Using metaverse transaction process, methodology, and currency in the real world of hospitality also enables learning that Gary Vaynerchuk and many others are already applying as part of their wider entry to the metaverse.
Here’s a vision of what Flyfish Club will be from the founders…