This week on Socially Loved I sat down with Liz Lathan, co-founder of Club Ichi, and it turned into one of my favorite conversations I have had on this show. We recorded it on the ground at Cannes, in the hottest week France has had in years, and the whole thing kept circling back to one idea I cannot stop thinking about. An audience is there for you. A community is there for each other.
Liz is one of the most genuine humans I have met in this industry. She welcomes everyone with open arms, and you feel it the second you are near her. That warmth is not a soft skill. It is the entire reason the community she built is real.
Club Ichi exists because something was missing. Liz calls it the reverse mullet. Party in the front, business in the back. The events world goes business so hard, panels and keynotes and breakouts all day, then a party at night with cheese cubes and music too loud to actually talk over. She decided to model better behavior. Meet as humans first. Let the business fall out of the people you already know, like, and trust.
Ichi is the Japanese word for one. She pulled it from a phrase that means one moment, one time. The moments of connection you cannot recreate. If you are just running a formula and doing the same thing over and over, she told me, it all blends together. You have to build something people cannot forget.
She means it. Club Ichi has flown members to Tuscany with zero details. Buy a ticket, meet in New York, bring a passport, do not ask where you are going. Now those tickets sell out in twenty minutes. That is not a stunt. That is years of earning the right to be trusted with someone's time.
So I asked her the question I think about constantly. Community is a word everybody uses and almost nobody executes. What does real community actually require? You have to think about the difference between an audience and a community, she said. You can build an audience and they can think they know you, but they are there for you. When you build a community, they are there for each other. And if you can step away for a week and it is still going, then you have got something.
That is the whole thing. It is what I have been building toward for years, and it is exactly where this industry is heading. Reach is easy. Belonging is the work.
We closed on something that matters more than any tactic. If you feel alone in your industry right now, hear this. You are not. There are people like you. Go find them. Collaboration over competition. Chill with the gatekeeping. Like Liz said, we are not saving babies here. We can do this, and we can do it together.