Powering leading festivals with experience commerce

At Easol, we’re dedicated to building a platform that puts the ownership back into the hands of experience creators and gives you all the power and tools to grow your business, on your terms. We’re proud to be working with experience creators in 135 countries around the world, including incredible festivals such as Envision Festival in Costa Rica, Otherlands in Scotland, Meadows in the Mountains in Bulgaria and Wanderlust globally from Australia to Mexico. 

And today, we’re excited to welcome the world’s leading afrobeats brand Afro Nation with festivals in Portugal and Ghana, along with the legendary Secret Garden Party and El Dorado to Easol.

Putting the power back into the hands of festival organisers 

Afro Nation, Secret Garden Party and El Dorado are focused on providing their customers  with an unforgettable experience but like many other festivals, they have long been restricted by traditional ticketing platforms and outdated booking tools.

The old ways of ticketing don’t work because they control how you display your brand, how you access your customer data, how you manage your payment terms and even when you get paid.

We’ve built Easol and re-designed ticketing from the ground up with a whole new category of commerce called Experience Commerce — an all-in-one toolkit that puts the control back into your hands, so that you can run and sell your festival on your terms. 

“When it comes to organising Secret Garden Party each year, we need a technology solution that is intuitive and easy to use so we can easily update our website with new information, add things to it as our festival grows and develops,” says Suzi Sendama, Head of Commercial at Secret Garden Party. “We weren't able to do this with any other solution or partner in a straightforward way until we found Easol.”

Here are just some of the top reasons why some of the biggest names in UK and European festivals are switching to Easol’s experience commerce.

1. Get weekly payouts and take back control over finances

No more waiting weeks or months after your festival to get paid. On Easol, you’ll get paid for your sales weekly. That means you can access your money whenever you need it, get more financial visibility and can better manage your cash flows.

“We had to jump through so many hoops to actually get access to funds for our 2022 event,” says Suzi. “As an independent festival, we don't have the same buying power as events owned by big companies. We can't put on our event without the ticket money. We need the money from ticket sales in order to pay deposits, secure acts, develop content and secure suppliers. This became a huge problem and something that we really needed to rethink for 2023.”

Suzi continues, “With Easol, we stand a much better chance of being able to access our funds from ticket sales immediately, because of the way the platform is set up.”

2. Build your brand on your own website, on your own domain

Easol’s Palette is the first website builder that’s specially designed for experiences. You can get full control over your brand, create the website of your dreams and own the entire journey — from homepage to checkout and payment. The customer never leaves your site and you can design it end-to-end.

“The platform is so intuitive, it's so easy to have the ability to update our website, add things to it, create pages and make changes in a way that we were not able to do before,” says Suzi. “That for us as an independent festival is very helpful. We're a really small team who work on the event and just to be able to do things more quickly you know, is really helpful.”

3. Design a custom booking journey that drives revenue

No more generic booking pages or disjointed third-party booking tools. From tickets and packages to accommodations and add-ons, you can create a custom booking journey that lives directly on your website that's fully tailored to your festival. This allows you to easily upsell customers and increase average basket spend and overall revenues. Our team at Easol are also dedicated to continuously adding even more conversion tools and new ways to drive sales.

Luke Wolfman, Co-Founder El Dorado, says: “Being able to upsell everything on one booking journey where everything is all working in-sync, with our own branding, will only help us sell more whilst providing a much better booking experience for our customers too.” 

Discover the new way to sell festivals

Easol’s all-in-one toolkit comes with many more capabilities that are designed to help you run and grow your festival business — from setting your own booking fees, payment plans and deposits to owning data to track customers that’s critical for advertising campaigns.

To see the toolkit in action, plus hear inspiring creator success stories, watch the Easol Showcase: Festivals Edition for free. Here’s a quick peek:

Christian Murphy

Marketing Manager - Festivals and Music

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