Managing Vendors: Bay Area Festivals Success Story

Meet: Bay Area Festivals

Types of Events: Book fairs, Oktoberfest, Spring Festivals, Homeshows, Halloween Cons, Jazz Festivals
Attendance: 750-20,000
Affiliations: CalFest.org

Overview: Bay Area Festivals, led by owner Jay Bedecarre, has produced nearly 100 festivals, fairs and special events around the greater San Francisco Bay Area since 2009. They both produce their own events and partner with cities and other orgs as an event production company. Over the past couple of years, managing vendors with EventHub’s software has supported their success in key areas.

Challenge: Managing and Finding New Vendors

After Covid, Jay’s company had a major challenge to bounce back strongly. He not only had to restart and produce many events with reduced resources, but had to replace previous vendors who went out of business during covid to keep this shows full. As such, he was interested in managing vendors through EventHub in order to help him managing the large amount of vendor applications and information related to each event and to track and collect payments for each of those vendors. He also wanted to benefit from the marketplace finding him new vendors to help sell out his event space and keep his offering fresh for attendees.

EventHub Result and Core Benefits

The platform provided Jay with digital, customizable applications for collecting vendor interest and info. In Jay’s words, EventHub is great because “Vendors can see information of all of our events in one shot” (via their platform portfolio page). “We previously printed out a ton of paperwork but stopped doing that after the first event” (because EventHub stores all paperwork in the cloud dashboard for easy reference and future access). “A good chunk of vendors are new people finding us through the marketplace.”

Additional Benefits When Managing Booths and Tables

Jay mentioned how EventHub’s customer success team was very helpful, not only answering his questions quickly and following up to ensure his success with the answers, but also with nudging his vendors along when needed within the system to complete their requirements.

On the day of their event they can easily jump the platform to manage which vendors need to pay and see what’s going on with anybody who’s missing. “We just did an event with 60 tables and we were able to easily track the 3 or 4 tables who still owed us money, and were able to have them pay at the door.”

Conclusion

Bay Area Festivals found success managing vendors on EventHub, by saving time and effort managing booth applications and deliverables, as well as in finding new parters through EventHub’s unique marketplace. They continue to have a thriving business, spinning up new event concepts and taking on new projects on behalf of clients such as their upcoming fall Oktoberfest!

CLICK HERE to request a demo via Zoom walk-through on how EventHub can help your festival, expo, or fair.

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