The historic May Co. building in Downtown Los Angeles could have a future in the metaverse.
Emcee, a New York-based social commerce platform, has designs on the 1.2 million-square-foot former department store for its Emcee Studio, a physical hub for a virtual world.
Launched last year, the startup enables creators and influencers to create and curate customized storefronts. But that’s just the start of founder and CEO John Aghayan’s vision for the company, which includes cryptocurrency, the blockchain, avatars, virtual real estate and 3D experiences.
Integral to his plans is Emcee Studio, a physical space for creators, brands, and public and private companies across all industries to gather, collaboratively developed by the people who will use it.
Emcee has identified 801 S. Broadway as that hub and said it has entered the diligence process to buy it.
First opened as a Hamburger’s Department Store in 1908, the property — now known as the Broadway Trade Center — was purchased in 2014 by Waterbridge Capital and Continental Equities for $122 million. The building was vacated, the interiors demolished, and the façade restored, along with seismic upgrades.
The new owners had ambitious plans for a mixed-use development with office, retail, restaurant and hotel space, but that vision has yet to come to fruition, and the property was put on the market in November for a reported $425 million.
Aghayan declined to share the current purchase price. He told L.A. Business First that Emcee is “in contracts” and “actively raising” financing with undisclosed investors and “trying to close ASAP.”
“What I can tell you,” he said, “is there’s no debt.”
Among the players on the deal is Joel Schreiber, founder of building owner Waterbridge Capital, as well as an investor in Emcee.
Aghayan chatted with L.A. Business First about Emcee, its interest in L.A.’s Broadway Trade Center, and why a virtual world needs a physical hub.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What is Emcee, and why is it needed?
Emcee lets influencers very easily create online storefronts. It's a new way of looking at ... revenue, done in a way that instead of having a promo code and redirecting your followers to a different website they can have everything into one place. And as a shopper, I can shop (for) everything from one single place. Everything is much easier for both parties.
But the big idea behind it is to build a community of next-generation creators, consumers and brands that later on we will use to seed the population of a virtual world that we call Emcee City.
What will Emcee look like in the metaverse?
Facebook has 10,000 people working on it. We don't want to pretend that as a startup we're going to take over and hire tens of thousands of people.
What we can do is bring all the people together. The way we want to do this is we want to bring them under one roof. That's where the building comes into play. We want to bring in the tens of thousands of creators across all industries — whether it's gaming, blockchain, fashion, beauty, entertainment, film, music … but also private companies and public companies — and for everybody to collaborate on this open metaverse.
Emcee launched nationwide last year as a social commerce platform, but you're describing a much bigger vision. How do you get from here to there?
We are going to go step by step: We're building our community. We basically build a tool to build this database of consumers, creators and brands. …
We're about to introduce a blockchain-based rewards program, so the more the influencers are going to sell on the platform, the more coin they will earn; the more people are going to shop on the platform, the more coin they will earn. But to add this coin, they're going to have wallets. It's going to be invisible to the eye, and they know it’s secure, but it's a wallet. …
The third phase — now we have the people, they have a wallet, they have money, then comes identity. We're going to introduce avatars. You're going to be able to purchase with the coin, and you're going to start to be able to buy virtual real estate. …
Once we have this map — so we have the users, they have money, they have virtual real estate — we can start playing around with the tech that's available today and have 3D experiences. … It's much easier if everybody's gathered under one roof.
What's your business model? How do you make money?
For now we take a commission on sales — pretty straightforward. Then, in this virtual world, of course, we're going to sell virtual land. There are our sales of first-party assets. And then there's also a commission on secondary sales of first-party assets. But we'll also have a marketplace for third-party assets. So we have also a commission on that marketplace.
What role will the Broadway Trade Center play in your plans for building this virtual space?
It’s to build a hub for Web3 and the metaverse, whether you're an individual, a creator, company, private, public. … It has been a buzzword for such a long time — “the future of retail” — but we think this should really be the future of retail and everything will be fully augmented and all the retail partners will need to have both a physical and digital offering.…
We're going to develop the last floor and the rooftop because that's already 240,000 square feet. Then with tokens you can attach voting mechanisms and governance, so we're going to involve the community voting (in) what happens. Because we don't want to build 1.2 million square feet and hope that we've built what they want. So we're going to build this last floor and rooftop, and then we're going to go level by level all the way down to retail. We also cannot fill 1.2 million square feet on day one with people.
Emcee is based in New York. Why build Emcee Studio in Los Angeles?
It's a capital for creators … NFT companies, avatars, gaming; the communities in Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey; film, music, everything … Also the size of the building. It's a mix of all this. You can’t do this vision in like 200,000 square feet.
Is that why you ended up downtown versus Santa Monica or Venice?
Yes, but I think also downtown is on the rise. The building is right across from the Apple Store. Fell in love with the building, the roof.
How do the views from that roof compare to the views that you have out your window in New York?
Different but as amazing.
