chai and vibes's vision
tackling the friendship recession with intentional spaces, an initial manifesto
chai and vibes vision
summer of 2021, the fog of covid was still around but people started to get vaccinated and were ready to go out. chai and vibes started as a means of providing a sober-curious alternative to a club/bar/hookah lounge scene. it was so deceptively simple, that it’s sort of hilarious. we started off at a random neighborhood park by an airfield in Los Angeles because we couldn’t get into our original location on the beach.
over time we grew and we began to fill a palpable need. namely, here’s a bunch of young people in big cities that live relatively sober lifestyles (or are at least curious) who are looking for ways to make friends outside of the norm. our community popup was just the operation that fills this need. over the past 2 years, we’ve popped up in LA, the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas. our events have scaled from 30 people in that little random park by the airfield to 300+ people in Central Park, NYC to 500+ people in Lake Merritt, Oakland CA. we’ve met hundreds of people along our journey, and have been able to provide spaces for people to make friends.
you see, our thesis is really simple: get people outdoors with a warm non-alcoholic beverage in hand, and have them talk. and as we’ve scaled, we’ve realized the importance of providing spaces to meet people with different needs for friendship at different stages of their lives. for example, the needs of friendship for a recent graduate looks very different from a recent divorcee rebuilding their lives. a large 300-400 person event might be really exciting for an extroverted new grad, but horrifying for an introverted one (jeez, does ANYBODY care about US introverts?! amirite?)
despite there being so many needs for friendship that yearn to be met, we tended to focus in on a core group: people who move to big cities. most people in big cities are transplants cut off from existing social support systems so they’re much more open to meeting and making new friends out of necessity. if you’re a native to a big city or even a local (e.g. went to college in the area and stayed ever since), you usually have your circles and there’s not too much incentive to meet new people — let alone integrate them into your life. in Seattle, for example, the city is known for the “Seattle Freeze” (which btw im sure u can find variations of in other cities, but i digress) where it’s hard to make friends because, while everyone is friendly, no one wants to commit to a new friendship.
our focus starting out was to work out of a niche: the Muslim community. the entire chai and vibes team is Muslim so it makes it that much easier to create a network effect. ideally, our large-scale events drew in crowds of 300-500 young Muslims in any given city from different stages of life. its from that launch pad that we have an idea of three distinct tiers of events that can help people make new friends.
large scale tier (300+) e.g. Chai and Vibes [Insert Name of City]
our large scale events are the answer to the questions "where are my people? where is my tribe?" starting off in a big city, these two questions are usually at the top of the list. you try out a bunch of things: sports, classes, clubs, bars, hanging out with co-workers, improv, etc. you may find a bunch of really cool people on one off occasions, but you may not be really building a friend group or a tribe.
our brand’s ability to bring out the masses in any given city is to give you, a newcomer, the overwhelming sense that “woah, there ARE people like me here!” and don’t get me wrong, we want you make friends at these big events but we also realize 1) that’s really hard to do, 2) not everyone’s cup of tea.
but we’ll still contend that big events like ours are a great way to start your journey of making friends. because, more likely than not, we hope the friends that you’ll eventually make will also be at a large Chai and Vibes event and the event can serve as a common ground purely on the basis of you just having attended it. look, if we sent out a survey asking people if they made at least 1 new friend at these big events, we'd bet luck to get a 3-4%< success rate. but the better metric we’re trying to hit is actually are you at least 1% more likely to find a new friend? we believe yes.
mid tier (80-150) e.g. Post Moves
ok so you’ve either attended our large scale events or just found them flat out too overwhelming to come to. the next question we want to answer is: how do i build out these relationships with said people that came to that big event? typically you meet people at our big events and grab their insta’s, snaps, #’s, etc and hit em’ up later. but what if you weren’t able to or you just didn’t vibe with the people you ran into that night?
our mid-scale (60-120 people) events brings out a random sample size from that larger scale event, and getting them in a room with unlimited chai, yes, but also to build experiences through art! at our first mid-tier event, we had: a poetry station where you can ask a poet for a typewritten poem, an open canvas anyone can add to, and a holiday card making station among other cool experiences. the idea is, we want you to come in and leave with a tangible memory in hand. either its something you can literally take home or it’s a physical experience like drawing that etches an experience to memory.
crafts tier (30-60 people)
the last question on friendship that we can answer for people is, what can we do as friends and foster these friendships? perhaps you have lots of friends and things are starting to get stale so you all want to break away from the drudgery of planning a night just to go out an eat somewhere or play codenames for the 100th time at someone’s apartment. maybe you’ve just met some people at event and are just looking to deepen the friendship a little more than randomly getting coffee every now and then. in all cases, our crafts tier of events can help answer the question, “what can we do to deepen our relationships with others?”
this is chai and vibe’s “hot take” on the best way to build friendship. past the clout chasing and social ladder climbing inherent in all big cities, we believe the best way to strengthen relationships is to make cool stuff together. The writer of “The Chronicles of Narnia” got it down to a tee:
If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.
- C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”
the tl;dr of that fancy quote is that if you’re focused on working on a hobby and getting better at it, 1) you’re probably not going to be worried about the who’s who, so you’re less likely to feel fomo. 2) you’re trying things out to see what YOU like, not what everyone else likes. 3) you walk away having made something cool or having been become better at something.
our craft-based events are workshops of 30-50 people where we can teach each other to learn a particular skill or meet people with likeminded interests repeatedly over the course of weeks. we haven’t launched these yet so we please keep a look out for them in the months to come.
how we move
i wrote briefly in another letter of how we think of design at chai and vibes, and, because i believe design is integral to our vision, i’d like to reiterate our design philosophy once again here.
this week we were supposed to have a chai and vibes in NYC but we had to postpone because potential for rain. but out of this attempt, came this design i thought was really cool. ive been wanting to work with this artist for at least a year now, and i like her style. ive received feedback that this is really “offbrand” for C&V and that it didn’t reflect the venue that we have.
yeah, it is different. its definitely a departure from the norm. but that’s who we are. this whole project started out as an experiment to see if people even wanted something like a chai popup at a park to make friends. experimenting and being wonky is in our DNA. a maximalist aesthetic where a shit ton is going on is the kind of “hate me or love me, you watched” message we embrace.
we are unafraid to try things, and consistently break the mold of what you think of us. to be irreverent is at our core. i stand on this hill, and will happily defend our design decisions. fuck a curated aesthetic, that’s boring. we want you to show up to our spaces as you are, as we exist. our design will reflect that. as the apple marketing philosophy goes “we will impute the desired qualities.” and if you still stick around, you a real one and we mess with you heavy. if you a fair day fan, we’re good on that lol.
the end goal
at each tier, beyond providing a space, we want to provide you resources at each stage to grapple with each of the questions we listed per tier. but our ultimate goal? our dream is to help you unlock your dreams of creating/building/writing/drawing/making cool stuff — to help you foster your creativity and create. because it’s by actively creating something that we build shared experiences with those around us.
“Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
- Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”
its not enough to say that “we want to help people make friends,” or that we want to address loneliness. the former is vapid, the latter is clinical to a fault. most people don’t want to admit that they are lonely! you need to call people toward something, provide them with an out from their loneliness into something far better worth being a part of.
so i reframe loneliness in a slightly different way. loneliness is typically defined by the sadness that comes from not having close friends or company. at chai and vibes, we define loneliness as the frustration that comes from being unseen and unheard. you exist as a person, and you want to exist with others — is that too much to ask for? no, no it’s not. we believe that the people who may be looked down upon for being “lonely” just need the right avenue and the right platform to be seen and heard. and when they are heard, seen, and feel loved by friends — they will be able to unlock their own creativity. and when they do that, they will bring about beautiful things into the world that we haven’t yet witnessed but will be honored to.
at chai and vibes, we execute really fun events that are thoughtfully designed to help you make new friends in big cities over curated experiences. of course, along with a cup of chai. everything else is secondary to that.
i am fixated on, obsessed with, and enamored by this vision. i want to pursue this with i7sān or excellence. anything short of that is a fucking joke lmao. i hope that you all can join us along the way.
sincerely,
haroon