Hennessy and Friends With Benefits DAO Team Up for Exclusive NFT Drop, ‘Café 11’

It’s a new way to enjoy Hennessy with friends.

This month, the 257-year-old cognac producer will launch an NFT together with the web3 collective Friends With Benefits. The $450 non-fungible tokens go on sale to the public on November 4 and give users access to Café 11, a new initiative that aims to cultivate 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 first Café 11 event kicks off on December 1st in Miami during Art Basel; Token holders will be allowed to participate in an immersive event that will last from 11.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m., and which will include tastings, live music and other experiences. The concept is a bustling Parisian café that transforms from a daytime lounge to an evening speakeasy.

Café 11 will, in the words of Hennessy CEO Laurent Boillot, be about “curiosity, community and culture”.

“What I like about it is the simple idea of ​​Café 11,” says Boillot. The “eleven” in Café 11 is a reference to the brandy producer’s daily tastings at 11.00, where Hennessy’s team tastes the eaux de vie which, with careful aging and a lot of patience, are transformed into cognac. “11 is a sacred time,” explains Boillot. “Then there was this idea of ​​Paris and cafes. There is this energy and this vibration in the cafe where people meet, discuss and invent the world.”

“It’s pretty amazing that a group of 3,500 internet friends get to partner with a brand of this caliber,” said Gabe Quintela, Friends With Benefits Head of Partnerships. “In many ways, FWB is a new social network. We’re building new forms of connection that value intimacy over scale, that manage and sustain themselves, and that can blur that line between digital and physical experiences.”

The project utilized FWB’s wide pool of talent. As a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, the collective operates without a traditional hierarchy and uses voting to pass decisions. In the case of the Hennessy project, the FWB took on the role of a creative agency, asking members with relevant expertise to collaborate. (Production costs were shared by Hennessy and FWB, and any resulting revenue will be split between 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 liquor 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 founder of Parade Agency, handled creative direction.

“That’s what’s so special about The DAO and the curation of what we do and the members we have,” says FWB’s Gabe Quintela. “We’re able to build this all-star team of individual talent. They’re bundled together and enabled under this umbrella of the DAO itself. In many ways, it changes the future of work. It changes the way agencies or businesses will look forward, if you thinking about the possibilities of who we collect.”

A limited edition culture pass, or loyalty card, which offers exclusive benefits, 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 location and filled with pleasant well-dressed guests, remains a stand-by marketing tool for consumer brands, especially in the luxury space.

Yet the delivery of Café 11 digital membership via an NFT is still revolutionary, given that most brands, let alone well-known French luxury names, remain skeptical of the promise of web3. To be sure, the headlines surrounding speculation and hacks in the web3 space are not out of the question. As a nod to the constant threat of hackers and bad actors, FWB utilized Zora, a web3 toolkit that authenticates, secures and audits smart contracts on the blockchain.

Still, where some raised eyebrows, Hennessy’s Boillot saw an opportunity to cultivate a new way to connect with Hennessy fans. “I was very involved in the web 2 world,” he says. “The team around me know that I brought some elements from that time with me.” The medium may change, he notes, but basic business principles are timeless. “It’s simply about how you engage your customers. It’s always the same. What doesn’t change is that you really have to understand your goal.”

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 of having this engagement, probably with stronger capabilities,” notes Boillot. 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 December 1st party, but details have not yet been announced.)

That said, there was early pushback to the concept, even among those within the company. Hennessy was founded in 1765 and is, after all, only a few years older than the United States itself, and there were concerns about damaging the brand value. “We may have some moments of experimentation and learning, and certainly mistakes,” says Boillot. “But the one thing I want to avoid is damaging the Hennessy brand. That’s something I always ask myself: Is it right for Hennessy’s equity?”

The swirl of speculation surrounding the NFT and crypto space, as well as environmental issues, remains a concern as brands tiptoe into the brave new world of web3. Brands that create physical things, such as actual bottles of spirits meant to be sipped in person, are still struggling with the idea of ​​how to make it work. Some spirits markers are experimenting with using NFTs to authenticate rare bottles, while others are using playful immersive experiences that serve as this generation’s version of a Times Square billboard.

“Any time I see that there might be something about speculation, I’m super resistant,” says Hennessy’s CEO. “I don’t want to see my NFTs in OpenSea with the value going down and down.” He also notes that his business is, after all, about physical objects. “We actually sell 100 million bottles on an annual basis, which is quite a lot of turnover. I don’t expect overnight web3 and metaverse to make the numbers better than this. This is really much more about experimentation.”

Boillot adds that the project is not about offering a web3 project just for a technological trend. “I really consider this, first of all, just a door to access people in communities that we have something in common with,” he adds. “I think the web3 community and the DAOs can help with that.”

That said, this NFT project, for all its fleeting technology, had to include a way for real people to taste real cognac, Hennessy’s CEO emphasized.

“The future will be the same: bridges between these two worlds,” he says. And there will be a future, he says, because just like a friendship, the partnership will develop into new experiences.