Austin Goes Vegas VICCI’s Classy Off-Sixth-Street Concept is a Texas Success
By Jenny Adams
Austin, Texas — the name conjures up images of faded blue
jeans, vintage cowboy boots, pressed corn tortillas and roadside
armadillos. The city itself also brings a relaxed feel both with gentle
night breezes and a heavy hole-in-the-wall dive bar scene. However,
through the past decade, Americans have been flocking there in search
of Southwest scenery and pricey property. The secret of America’s
cleanest, friendliest city has been leaked, and the population has
almost doubled since 1995 — with upper-middle class stamped all over
it.
There now are new markets to be explored in this live music lovers’
Nirvana, though, and although many would have stepped back, taken a
visual sip of the bar scene and declared it perfectly mixed — they
would have been wrong. The prospects are there, and some savvy insiders
are striking gold.
VICCI, pronounced (sans the irony) like “Gucci,” opened its doors a
mere 10 months ago to an experience-thirsty, very upscale demographic,
and since has drawn thousands of guests, laying down credit cards as
platinum as the mirrors that make up the venue’s 36-inch disco ball.
VICCI, as 2005 has demonstrated, is exactly what Owner Mike Yassine
intended it to be: Austin’s first and foremost answer to the premier
evening out.
Crowd Pleasers
“They are late 20s, early 30s,” General Manager Brittney Hitzfelder
says of the white-collar professional clientele who fill the club’s
13,000 square feet every Thursday through Saturday night. “They want to
let loose and dance a little bit. Neither gender is dominant, as well
as nationalities. It is across the board.”
Taking the population of Austin into serious account has been
imperative to the club’s success, and Yassine has done a flawless job
of it. VICCI meets culture with culture, integrating intense music
diversity with both male- and female-friendly promotions, elaborate
drink concepts and recently introduced Salsa dancing on Thursday
nights.
“VICCI’s demographic is pretty ethnic,” says Yassine, who is of
Lebanese descent himself and no stranger to the business side of
Austin’s late-night party as owner of Treasure Island, Fuel and Spill.
“It is 65 percent Anglo, 30 percent Hispanic and about five percent
other. A lot of clubs here are set to one format. We play all of it —
Techno, House, Hip-Hop, Alternative, Disco, International, ‘80s.”
And while many club owners in Austin spend large amounts of revenue on
rotating DJs, sacrificing guest numbers to explicit genres of sound,
VICCI operators spent the first month of business testing out
contenders to fill the permanent position in the main booth. Settling
on DJ Mondo as the head Saturday night DJ meant that the staff could
cultivate an in-house relationship with him, while also ensuring the
music would remain a surprise for guests each night, but never a
surprise for the management. “His library is so wide,” Yassine says,
“that every night is completely different. We wanted someone who could
keep people on the floor all the time.”
No Expense Spared
Hailed as upscale Mediterranean flair meets Vegas VIP service, VICCI’s
design is what has most patrons’ jaws on the floor the first visit, and
their friends in tow by the second. Three levels and a patio can
accommodate 1,200 at capacity, but the numbers on the books speak of
even larger volumes coming in and out each weekend. Dan Herman, whose
work can be seen in all three of Yassine’s previous Austin endeavors,
was hired for the overall design. “He is a pretty talented kid,”
Yassine says of the 30-something Herman. “He designs and builds
everything on-site. All of the welding and metal work was done there.
He built all the furniture. The bar top was built there and the dance
cages.”
Begun in June of 2004, VICCI was alive and kicking nine months later.
Upon entering, guests immediately are hit with the action. The dance
floor, splashed in explosions of sound and light, is surrounded by
cages encircling scantily clad dancers. But, the cherry topping of it
all definitely is the DJ booth. This is not solitary turntable in a
corner. VICCI’s main booth is decked out and deck styled, suspended off
the second floor, above the infatuated crowd. At a $1,000 minimum to
reserve, the club’s most coveted VIP area serves up to 20 patrons at a
time, eye level with the DJ and above and far beyond the lower-level
action.
The disco ball, which incidentally is the only remnant of the previous
tenant, Polly Ester’s, is flanked by two snow machines that rain a
foam-based, dry snow every hour on the hour. “It doesn’t make the floor
slippery,” says Benny Siegert, who worked with Herman on the club’s
design, particularly in the areas of stereo equipment and lighting. “It
comes out as a sud and actually becomes a flake as it falls towards the
floor.” This precious precipitation comes at a high price tag, though,
around $80 a gallon, and must be mixed specifically for Yassine’s club,
since Austin’s dry climate makes the formula a little more difficult to
fine-tune, Siegert says.
An Amazing Ambiance
Siegert, who has remained at VICCI well beyond the construction stage
to become known as the man behind all the illumination, isn’t merely
flipping a light switch at the club. There are Color Kinetics color
mixing light fixtures throughout the whole venue, with iColor Cove
under all of the bars and ColorBlast luminature accenting the wall
features. The 26 intelligent lighting fixtures run off of a Martin
Light Jockey, and “it offers a whole lot of variations,” says Siegert.
“It is really quite a set up.”
The crème de la crème is one of the largest indoor waterfalls in
Austin, located at the front door. Glass bricks are backlit with water
cascading constantly across the front. “It has color washing all the
way down,” says Daniel Wyatt, owner of Moonscape Lighting and Design,
and a key player in VICCI’s astounding overall luster. “You can’t just
go to Home Depot and buy the stuff. When it comes to sound and
lighting, it is about finding new ways of doing stuff that other owners
aren’t doing. We had to find a way to make the light show fit in with
the design. It is not over the top, but it is like, ‘Man this is cool!’”
And it keeps getting cooler. Two CO2 tanks spray cold blasts to
moderate a slammed dance floor, which is a given since VICCI is decked
out in almost 85,000 watts of sound. The lowest level, the Di Lusso
Lounge, opened in October of 2005, and the space utilizes a JBL system
while the upstairs employs a combination of Eminence and Cerwin Vega.
The DJ equipment is slightly varied with a scratch live, computer-based
vinyl simulation and live CD mix tables.
Late-Night Libation Flair
With sound and lighting painstakingly perfected, guests are enticed to
linger in VICCI’s opulent environment for an entire night of dancing,
lounging, attentive service and creative cocktails. In a place where
even the security staff is hired partially for their personal poise and
decked out in finely tailored suits, the drink list has a large
reputation to live up to. UV Vodka begins the rail liquor selection,
and staff easily pour out two to three cases of it each weekend, but
the bottle service often is the most intense activity when a hot night
in VICCI is underway. Cocktail waitresses may carry out more than eight
bottles in an evening for the big spenders, with Grey Goose as the
leading request.
The Di Lusso Lounge grand opening was sponsored by a lesser-known
company, Philips Union Whiskey, which matched a new product with a new
place, and, subsequently, created a freshly requested staple in
Austin’s only subterranean VIP lounge.
“They (Phillips Union) actually have flavored whiskeys,” says Marketing
Director Kim Richardson. “It is a new thing. Their cherry is great, but
their vanilla is fantastic. So, it is something that we carry at the
club now, and we are selling a lot of it.”
Richardson, who began at VICCI as a bartender, has watched the brand’s
popularity evolve with the club. “Every single time I sold (guests) on
it, then they drank it all night long,” she says. “Girls like to get
cherry and vanilla mixed with Coke. Whiskey is generally something that
men drink, but they have definitely tapped into the female market.”
Like everything else in VICCI, there is a flair to the bottle selection
few other venues can match. Everyone has top-shelf, but how about
top-shelving? Yassine had a custom bottle escalator designed, rotating
the wine, liquor and Champagne from the first-floor bar to the second
behind some of the city’s fastest and sexiest bartenders. Guests
succumb quickly to VICCI’s mesmerizing panache, and while several
bottles of the Dom Perignon Rosé hit the VIP tables at $400 a cork-pop,
Champagne flutes accompany an average five bottles a night of the $300
Cristal.
Always Advertising
Making friends in high places was easy for Yassine, considering his
19-year history in the town, and local radio personalities added to the
VICCI experience multiple times in his first year. “Advertising is
always something that is so important,” he says. “We are a big club. We
have to advertise. Where other clubs can get by with 300 people, we
can’t.”
Yassine focuses on his demographic through the “old-fashioned” mass
media. Abe and Rapid Rick, hosts of the local station 94.7 Mix, not
only tout the venue on air by day but rock the DJ booth a few nights a
month. “The radio advertising definitely works better,” Yassine says.
However, he still reaches a broad range of clientele through print
advertising in the city’s upscale publications such as Tribeza, a
high-end Austin magazine, and Celebrate Austin, a hotel publication.
The Loveliest View
Not afraid to pull out the club’s credit card himself, Yassine also has
played host to several grand-scale events, including a performance by
the Pussycat Dolls of Las Vegas. October was even renamed at the club
as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with the venue’s drink list going
predominantly pink. On Fridays, the first 100 women inside were treated
to free manicures and specials on all magenta-hued cocktails.
For the future, Yassine says he views Austin as home and the market as
fertile. “I like the fact that it is growing,” he says. “Austin is a
college town that in the last five years has been looking for upscale.
“I thrive on competition. I think it is a good sign for me that I am
doing something that is affecting other people. Nothing makes me
happier as a bar owner than to stand at the rail and see 400 people on
the dance floor having a good time.” NCB
Austin, Texas — the name conjures up images of faded blue
jeans, vintage cowboy boots, pressed corn tortillas and roadside
armadillos. The city itself also brings a relaxed feel both with gentle
night breezes and a heavy hole-in-the-wall dive bar scene. However,
through the past decade, Americans have been flocking there in search
of Southwest scenery and pricey property. The secret of America’s
cleanest, friendliest city has been leaked, and the population has
almost doubled since 1995 — with upper-middle class stamped all over
it. 
