Friendship as a design principle: how Monique built let me know club

Monique is the founder of let me know club, a Philadelphia-based community centered on arts and crafts with one explicit goal: helping adults make friends. She started it two years ago with no savings, no venue, and no arts background. She now hosts 15 to 20 events a month. I spoke with her about what it actually takes to design with belonging in mind.

Zelda: You started let me know club two years ago in Philadelphia. What were you trying to create?

Monique: I come from a yoga background, and that’s where I really found my love of community. I did an entrepreneurial program in Philadelphia, and my original goal was to open a yoga studio. But the more I talked to mentors, the more I realized what I actually wanted was a community space.

The name came to me in a dream. I had been going to call it Third Space, but when I went to make the Instagram, there was already a Third Space Philly. So I went to sleep, and in a dream I was asking a friend what they were doing, and they said, let me know if you want to hang out. I thought, that’s it.

The vision was always about friendship. I grew up loving the feeling of being in school and seeing a board full of clubs you could sign up for: that excitement of belonging to something. I wanted to bring that back for adults.

“Everything about our branding is intentionally playful because I want people to feel that same childlike joy, whether they had it growing up or are looking to discover it now.”

Our first event was a galentines/friend speed dating on the day after Valentine’s Day. People showed up and I just saw how hungry they were for connection. That confirmed everything.

We do three types of events now: craft clubs led by our club leaders, artist workshops with local Philadelphia artists, and our Platonic Love Club, which is the friend speed dating we host at a vintage store in South Philly. That one is our most popular.

On top of your yoga background, you also come from ten years in restaurants. How does that background inspire the way you run events?

Honestly, I think hospitality is the most important thing I bring to this. I know what it feels like to be somewhere that doesn’t feel hospitable. And I know how it feels to work in hospitality and really care about making someone feel welcome. That’s a huge value of mine.

From restaurants, I also have a real obsession with timing and flow. I think you can have a lot of fluff in an event, and fluff is great: we’re a craft community, we love fun things. But for me, the foundation is that everything makes sense, the event flows, and we stay in our two hours. That’s non-negotiable.

I think people feel when they’re getting their money’s worth, and they feel when they’re not. If someone is paying $25 to come, they’re choosing to spend their money with us. That’s real. So we have to show up for that.

Walk us through what a let me know club event actually looks like.

Let’s use the junk journal club as an example, which has been going consistently since we started. From 11:55 to 12:15, we’re doing check-ins. We have these really cute punch cards, like a coffee shop loyalty card, and every time you come to club, we punch it. When you hit eight, you get a free club. So right at the door, people are already part of something.

Once everyone’s in, we do introductions. A lot of people who come are new to the city, so we like to find out where people live. Philadelphia has so many different neighborhoods and each one has its own vibe. It’s a fun way to start.

Then our club leader does a brief introduction to junk journaling. We don’t give instructions on how to do it right: it’s a very open practice. We set the foundations, lay out everything on the table: the stickers, the washi tape, the funky scissors, the scrapbook paper, and let people dig in. And what’s beautiful is that serious junk journalers will show up with a bag full of their own supplies and just start sharing with everyone at the table.

We cap events at 35 people. That’s intentional. We want people to actually connect with each other, and you can’t do that if there are a hundred people in a room. About 15 minutes before we end, we do a gallery walk. Everyone lays out their journal and we walk around and see what people made. It’s different every time. That’s the part that gets me every time.

We also have a volunteer program. We’re using a shared community space, so we need to set up and break down the tables each time. Instead of doing it all ourselves, we invite community members to help with setup and breakdown, and they craft for free that day. That’s really what makes this community run, not just community attended.

You’ve built your whole team from within the community. How do you find people and bring them on?

For artists, I’m at markets a lot. I’ll see someone’s work, love it, and say, have you ever done a workshop? And they usually say no, they’ve never even thought about it. So I’ll walk them through our framework, ask them to send me a Google doc with a workshop idea, and we develop it together. We’ve worked with nail artists, rosette makers, collage artists. Once we got bigger, they started finding us.

For club leaders and staff, it was the same thing. Sydney and Jasmine came through attending events. Becky came to club, then joined as a work exchange, and now she’s our paid club president. Salma was a community member who became our part-time graphic designer the same way.

I’m really proud that the majority of the artists we work with are women of color and people from marginalized communities. As a Black woman-owned business, being able to open up doors to people who might not have had that opportunity before: that’s one of the things that makes me feel most successful.

You offer community nights for $5 and glass-making workshops for $120. How do you think about pricing and accessibility?

When I started, I wanted everything to be free. My entrepreneurial program mentors set me straight pretty quickly. It’s just not sustainable.

What I learned fast is that when events are free, people don’t show up. Even $5 creates a sense of accountability. You paid for it. You’re going.

So now we do tiered pricing. Community nights are $5. Most craft clubs are around $25. For premium workshops like glass-making, it can go up to $120. We also offer low-income and BIPOC pricing, scholarships for summer camp, and a volunteer exchange: if you help with setup, you craft for free.

I’m still learning around money, honestly. I still don’t fully live off let me know club. I dog sit. I do other things. But I’m okay with that for now. And I think it comes down to values. People say friendship shouldn’t cost money. And I understand that. If you want to meet in the park, I fully support it. But there’s also a lot of money that goes into making these things happen, and we can’t do it without it being sustainable.

My niece is six and she said to me the other day, auntie, you’re rich. I said, what are you talking about? She said, well, you have club and you get to teach yoga and you have Happy, the dog you dog sit. And it really struck me.

There was a time I was showing up to work every day hating what I did. That’s not the case anymore. I get to live out a dream I didn’t even know I had. This community makes me feel rich.

What would you tell someone who wants to start something like this but doesn’t feel ready?

Do it with the resources you have.

When I started, I had just moved back to Philadelphia, I was 27 going through a crisis, no savings, no venue, no arts background. If I had waited until I had all of those things, I’d still be waiting.

The first six months, sometimes one person would show up. My mom was like, girl, you need to go back to nursing school. And I just kept going. I had to align my branding, figure out what I actually wanted let me know club to feel like, and once I did that, the right people started finding us.

You’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to fail. I’m a perfectionist and I was terrified of failure. There were nights I was sitting there wondering how I was going to keep going. But nothing went catastrophically wrong. I just learned along the way. And now I have a community full of people I love and who love us back.

I always say: sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t always feel good. You’re going to do things scared. But don’t let fear of failure take the driver’s seat. Put yourself out there. The people who are craving what you’re building are out there looking for it.