In their first episode, Caleb Parker, Future in 15 host interviewed Damian Oracki, Founder of Showslice. Showslice is a venue marketing platform that helps event organisers share infrastructure costs at the venue where the event is being held. This way, all stakeholders can save time, money and organise more sustainable events. Furthermore, by listing the event on their platform, Showslice promotes and sells available dates at the venue, offering an innovative sales channel.
Sharing economy in events
Damian’s story is very inspiring. He built the platform after working over 10 years in the events industry in different roles, including crewman, where he worked on the set-up & de-rig management. In other roles he did health & safety and venue management.
Through this experience, he saw the amount of work going into setting up and building the required infrastructure. On average, a set-up can take up to two day for a three hour event. Often shortly afterwards the crew needs to de-rig everything and start building again for the next event. For example staging, sound and lighting. After recognising this gap, this is how the idea of Showslice was born. To materialise his vision, Damian sold his crewing company to start Showslice in 2013. Today, it’s knows to many as one of the pioneers to bring the sharing economy into the events industry.
A solution was to create a communication platform that would allow organisers to have a sharing ability. Usually only big companies can do it at such a scale. As a result, the more events share their production costs, there is less negative impact on the environment through carbon emission on transport, waste and less labour is required. All parties involve can benefit from sharing resources and saving costs. For comparison, there is almost 70% on savings if you organise five events.
The first “Sliced” event
I’m proud to say that back in October 2015 I attended the London Lifestyle Awards as a guest of Showslice, their first “sliced” event. It was a big honour to be part of it and celebrate this milestone. On this occasion, Woman of the Future Awards took place on Tuesday the 27th October followed by the London Lifestyle Awards on Wednesday the 28th October at Hilton London Park Lane. Shortlisted business included restaurants, bars, nightclubs, sports clubs and other venues, hair stylists and more.
The event was great success! In 2016 it was marketed again through Showslice and shared production costs with another event.
I truly believe that it’s an innovative service for the event industry and hope more event stakeholders will recognise the economic and environmental values in sharing production costs.
Who can benefit
Showslice brings four groups of event stakeholders together: the venue, event owners/sponsor, event planners and the production company/ suppliers. As for every new and “disrupting” company, it wasn’t easy in the beginning, but now they have great clients on board who keep booking via their platform year on year, because they see how much cost they can save. Their clients include charities, industry and media companies who organise gala dinners, fund raisers or award nights.
In this episode, Damian also spoke about the challenges he encountered, Showslice’s funding and what’s next for them. View the full episode to get further insights.
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