First off, could you tell us what COCO means? What does COCO stand for and what is the ethos behind the brand?
COCO’s offer is tailored especially for internationals and expats who are coming to Paris for several months. We provide them with a place to live, work and socialise. What we aim for is that our colivers meet other inspiring individuals, and what we would love to achieve is to foster discussions and collaborations amongst our colivers and locals. We offer an opportunity for them to come together and create projects which, in turn, could produce an interesting and impactful contribution to the world.
For this purpose, we would like to attract very talented international professionals, artists, researchers and more to our spaces. ‘CO’ is the first syllable of the words collaboration and cooperation. The branding itself is welcoming and not pretentious, so we wanted a name that would reflect this, as well as a name that sounds fun.
What was the design process with The Letter O. like when collaborating on your brand development? Could you tell us how you came up with your current branding and all of the assets that go with it?
The Letter O. and their positioning is very consistent with COCO. Their clientele includes luxury hotel groups, well-known artists, high-end craftsmen and fine jewellery brands. While we wanted the branding to be unpretentious and remain fun, we still needed to convey the upscale element – in the coliving landscape, COCO is definitely on the higher-end. The Letter O. helps us to make COCO a desirable hospitality brand, but also to convey our uniqueness, which lies in the fact that we are not only in the hospitality industry, but also exploring the art of creating places which favour discussions and collaborations.
The agency is involved in all aspects of our communications, including our website, the design of our spaces, the selection of furniture in our apartments, the curation of events and even in the way we explain our strategy to investors. This strong involvement of The Letter O. at every stage brings consistency in the messaging we want to convey, while also ensuring that we keep on searching for excellence in all that we do, from furnishing apartments to curating events.
What makes your brand positioning unique? How has this positioning evolved since you first started off and what have you learned along the way?
What is unique is that the apartments are all individually curated and furnished – all the spaces are different. They’re also located in the most lively and desirable neighbourhoods of Paris, like Le Marais and St. Germain des Près. What our colivers value is the mix between their intimacy in their apartments, and the possibility to socialise whenever they want in our coworking space in Le Marais and during events organised in our spaces, such as art exhibitions or live talks. As a brand, we’re far more interested in creating places that foster culturally relevant conversations between friends, rather than just being places to play.
Regarding our learning curve, one very important thing we have noticed is the need to be very reactive when a coliver informs us of a problem in the apartment, which requires our teams to intervene. Curating great events and having an intention to create strong bonds amongst our community members doesn’t prevent us from having to be extremely organised in our back office and daily operations.
What are some of the recent products and services you have developed? Could you tell us a bit more about COCO XL? Who is that aimed for and what made you head into that direction?
As an example of one of our services, we are developing a training course for those who would like to learn the specifics of French mentality, through the study of French thinkers, writers and philosophers. We would like our colivers to better understand the culture of the country they are visiting; the same roll-out and strategy would apply when we establish COCO internationally in other cities.
We also want to organise talks, similar to TED talks, where the content would be made by our colivers, like the researchers or artists living in our apartments.
Regarding COCO XL, these are individual apartments from 60 to 100 sqm. In these apartments, we are trying to attract more established colivers that have a goal of starting up companies or creating projects while in Paris. We noticed that some of these talented individuals would like to come with their family to Paris, and therefore need larger and more upscale spaces and apartments.
How does your brand foster long term impact within the coliving industry? How does it foster impact and sustainability in a broader sense (e.g. within local communities, the city level and wider real estate industry)?
I think that the coliving movement, which started as a spinoff of flat sharing, is going to evolve into a broader phenomenon, changing how people live and how they interact with their local neighbourhood. We want to be part of this trend towards new ways of living, where buildings are places for collaboration between its residents, and between the neighbours living in the area. A sign of this transformation is that some of our colivers are Parisians, which means that not only internationals are involved with COCO, but also locals who value the community and who want to stay for a long period, sometimes many years.
We also want to follow their life journey; for example, if they have kids, we continue to offer them a nice serviced apartment via our COCO XL range with access to a great community. In a certain way, coming to COCO could be seen as an investment, as some invest in an MBA to network. Having an apartment at COCO would not be seen as a cost, but as a way to help your projects materialise thanks to the access to a community of active leaders of change.
