Soho House Is Going Public, With Questions About Its Business

The parent company of Soho House, the chain of upscale members’ clubs for celebrities and well-heeled young professionals, is to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. But after pricing its I.P.O. at the low end of expectations, the question it faces is whether it can deliver on ambitious growth targets while keeping its cool, DealBook’s Michael J. de la Merced writes for The Times.

Membership Collective Group, the brand’s parent, proved it could survive the pandemic. It now has 119,000 members across 30 clubs around the world, with 59,000 people on the waitlist. The company retained 92 percent of members last year even with most of its clubs shut, and now many of its locations are back to 2019 capacity levels, Andrew Carnie, MCG’s president, told DealBook. “We’re pretty bulletproof,” he boasted.

(Nick Jones, the company’s founder and C.E.O., conceded that one thing had changed because of the pandemic….

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