After Allbright, is there a future for women-only members clubs?
Allbright has shut the doors to its Mayfair clubhouse, but it’s just one of many women-only members clubs to shut up shop. Anna Moloney speaks to the women who have attended and asks, do even they still want them?
In 2016, The Wing, a women’s-only private members club, opened in New York and it was heralded not only as a feminist utopia but as cool. Founding members included the likes of Cara Delevingne, Emily Weiss and Alexa Chung, while The Cut described its launch party – a “very adult sleepover” where high-powered women roamed in matching embroidered white pyjamas – as “a little like Instagram come to life”.
Within three years it had opened clubhouses in 11 locations, including one in Fitzrovia, and had become a part of a whole new ecosystem of exclusive women-only spaces, many of which tried their luck in London: Chief, Grace Belgravia, Marguerite and, of course, Allbright. Opened in 2018 by powerhouse co-founders Debbie Woskow OBE (co-chair of the Invest in Women Taskforce) and Anna Jones (now Telegraph Media Group CEO), Allbright quickly became one of London’s most prominent members clubs for women.
Until it all came tumbling down.
The decline of women-only clubs
In 2022, facing a combination of financial troubles, eroded membership from Covid-19 and a workplace culture scandal, The Wing ceased operations. Its London clubhouse had already been closed in 2020 only 10 months after its launch.
Chief, a New York-founded private network for executive women, tried to fill the gap in 2023 with the launch of a London outpost, but hastily closed it again in March 2024, citing a poor reception from the UK market. In the meantime, Grace Belgravia and Marguerite both also shut up shop. And then, finally, Allbright, which entered administration for the second time in January.
Thanks to a bailout from Cain International, Allbright will continue to operate, but only as a skeleton of its former self. Its Maddox Street clubhouse has been permanently closed and its physical presence will now only take the form of a co-hosted lounge in Old Sessions House in Farringdon. Given the response of one Allbright loyalist – “15 minutes down the road? It’s not even 15 minutes if you’re a drone!” – the arrangement seems unlikely to keep members paying.
All the women looked the same, were often from similar industries and definitely mostly from higher social circles
The University Women’s Club, which, founded in 1883, represents a rather different wave of feminism, is now one of London’s only women’s clubs left standing. And all while the private members club industry as a whole has supposedly been booming.
So what went wrong?
The challenges of clubonomics
First, it is important to acknowledge the challenges of clubonomics as a whole. Traditionally, such clubs were run as non-profit enterprises, owned and run by their members and thus primarily focused just on servicing them. Most modern iterations, in contrast, instead have to prioritise commercial considerations, which throws up a number of challenges for the model, not least the paradox of needing to balance expansion with exclusivity. Even Soho House, for example, despite having over 264,000 members and being valued at around $2bn in its latest buyout offer, has never actually turned a profit.
Seth Alexander Thevoz, author of London Clubland, said the decline of women’s clubs should be seen within this framework, with Allbright simply a casualty of the market’s usual fluctuations. “Given the huge demand for private members clubs, people often imagine that they must have a licence to print money. But that’s not the case. It can be really tough to break even, much less to turn a profit, and that’s reflected in how 90 per cent of clubs end up closing down. It’s been that way for centuries,” he told Morning Wire.
The impacts of the pandemic have also naturally made it harder for clubs to survive in the last five years, especially non-legacy ones which may not have the reserves to fall back on – a normal part of club management according to Thevoz. Indeed, he said most clubs he had looked at over the centuries had made a loss about two-thirds-to-three-quarters of the time and had been buoyed only by having built up considerable reserves over a long period of time.
Parallels with the rise and fall of the co-working space industry – Wework, as it happens, was a major investor in The Wing – are also apparent.
But, even so, it is undeniable that private members clubs are meant to be thriving right now. According to Knight Frank, more clubs have opened in the past four years than in the three decades following the 1985 opening of The Groucho Club, and the sector has been identified as one of the fastest-growing subsectors in the real estate industry. Soho Farmhouse has even been identified as a major driver of house prices in the Cotswolds, with demand for properties within a 15 minute drive of the club running at more than twice the average for the area as of last year. As a whole, the sector is expected to be worth $25.8bn by 2027.
Do women even still want women’s clubs?
Perhaps then, there is another question to be asked about women’s clubs: do women actually want them?
For some, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Catherine Baudino, a coach for high-powered executives and a founding member of Allbright, told me she had “been in mourning, figuratively speaking” since Allbright’s closure.
“I come from a generation when women didn’t help women at all in business, and I joke in my book that if you met a fellow female executive, you’d better wear a Kevlar vest, because she was more than likely to stab you in the back. So with Allbright, I really liked the concept of women helping women and women helping women to promote themselves,” she told me.
Now in search of a new club, she’s been visiting mixed-gender options, but said she felt strange in the ones predominantly populated by men. Don’t mistake Baudino for a feminist, though. Indeed, whenever I bring the term up she is hasty to correct me. “I wouldn’t talk about feminism. I would comment about women, supporting women… I don’t think it’s feminist.”
I broke the glass ceiling in 87, you can’t patronise me darling
But Baudino, like many others I spoke to, emphasised the unique “energy” of all-women’s spaces like Allbright, which made it so beloved. “I went there with my male marketing director, and he felt it immediately. So it wasn’t just women inspiring women. There was, I think, a common will to help others thrive.”
Alexandra Lunn, owner of a branding agency and former member of Allbright, told me she agreed there was a “different feeling when you walked in” to Allbright and likened it to the same atmosphere that draws women to Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. “It just felt like collaboration over competition. It felt like making friends… And then you would walk into the rest of London and it felt like a contrast, a stark contrast.”
Lunn also has been a member of all-women’s networking groups such as The Stack World and Marguerite and told me she found significant value from the networking opportunities provided, estimating that maybe 5-10 per cent of her income over the last seven years had been in some way connected to women’s-networking groups.
The premium associated with physical clubhouses, however, comes with significant costs (around £1,150 a year at Allbright, with extra fees for events on top), and Lunn ultimately only remained a member at Allbright for a year.
Where did Allbright go wrong?
Some women I spoke to said they felt the club had changed since its 2018 formation. While launched as a modern, business-focused women’s club aiming to diversify the business world by providing its members with career support and access to high-powered individuals, many felt let down by the reality of the club’s offering, especially in its later years. Its appointment of a male chair, in particular, left members bewildered. There is also, of course, a central tension in modelling a group which aims to increase equality on that of an old boys’ club.
As for the kind of women who frequented the club, one member I spoke to described the membership as consisting more of socialites than business women, and said the club increasingly became less valuable for those there for business purposes, with the events offering the kind of generic advice she could get for free elsewhere.
Johanna Beresford, CEO and founder at workplace DEI firm In Diverse Company, told me she had loved Allbright (which offered a welcome shift from the dingy corridor for the ladies’ loo at the Oxford and Cambridge club) when it opened but increasingly soured on it. “To start with I was inspired, my company held events and the space was beautiful, but my team noticed, as well as I, that all the women looked the same, were often from similar industries and definitely mostly from higher social circles”.
Beresford said she has since joined Luminary, a New York-based networking club which is women-focused but not women-exclusive, which she said she enjoyed more. “Having a space, that is for women, supporting all women to succeed, this can only be a good thing. But men must be part of that,” she said.
Some were more explicit on this point, with one member telling me she had started investing her money in mixed clubs instead simply because it offered a higher return. Men, after all, famously have more money.
That being said, Baudino did tell me there was one unique benefit of Allbright: Men would always accept an invitation to an event, so curious were they to get to see inside a space they were otherwise not allowed in.
Empowering or patronising?
To many who loved the club, Allbright’s closure felt sudden, but there were others who said they were not all too surprised, given the inherent challenges of the business model. One high-profile founder of a venture capitalist firm said she had felt the venture was mismanaged, and that the flaws of the business model ultimately punished its members. “I think, really unfortunately, even if you were trying to create safe space for women, actually you were somewhat exploiting them as an audience to try and prop up a business model that inherently is not sensible and viable.”
They added that, as well as simply not having enough time to lounge around in members clubs, the draws cited by other women for joining such networking groups never really resonated with her, and, by contrast, they often found the appeals more patronising than empowering.
“‘[The messaging was often] ‘do it here and we’ll help you’, with it almost implied because you can’t cope and do it in another space. I didn’t like that myself… I feel like what would be better is a universally inclusive space that helps people to develop confidence, public speaking skills, whatever it might be.”
The emphasis of some women’s clubs on “quote unquote girly things” like blowdry bars and beauty rooms has also produced mixed feelings. While some felt an emphasis on such perks worked more to reinforce gender stereotypes, others couldn’t help but admit to enjoying these offerings.
Asked whether she thought The Wing’s sleepover launch was misjudged, for example, Lunn responds: “Yeah I can see that… but I would go to the sleepover.” When I ask Baudino, she’s even more unfazed: “I broke the glass ceiling in 87, you can’t patronise me darling,” she says matter of factly.
Very well. As for the future of all-women clubs, overall, most of the women I spoke to agree there is a need for a more collaborative model, inclusive of all genders. Similar to the current backlash against DEI, there is a frustration not with efforts to increase equality, but with the often fluffy, box-ticking nature of them. Indeed, what stuck out from many of my conversations was a yearning for more concrete support specifically for women in business, rather than just the supplication of a comfortable atmosphere. If that means the death of the 2016 Girl Boss, so be it.