In a nutshell, Splendour in the Grass 2023 was... well, disappointing.
Although there were positives to take away and it would be beneficial to our business to sugarcoat our experience, we would prefer to call a spade a spade and be honest and transparent with how we felt things went.
Having worked, volunteered and attended Splendour multiple times in the past we were so excited (and proud) to have our Chill Bru Crew at a festival we have come to love. We love this festival for so many reasons - the moments and memories it has created, its energy and soul that builds and subsides, the friends that it brings together and the emotions it evokes. Dont get me wrong, we did see glimmers of that, but honestly, compared to previous years STIG 2023 was bland, it was just missing its secret sauce.
I mention the above to show we do have some understanding of the enormity of the machine that is a music festival of this size and we understand that sometimes things don't go to plan. However, we were rather disappointed as the communication with the organisers prior to the event was very poor. Often, our emails were blatantly ignored and we felt as if no one really cared about us (we spoke to a number of vendors over the weekend and this seemed to be a common trend).
Despite this, we took a punt and decided that the potential exposure of our brand to 50k people was worth what we had to put down. We committed and put our best foot forward. Our stall was placed in food hall 3 after specifically asking not to be in a food hall. This meant we were right in the corner of the festival, with no foot traffic and 2 stalls away from another coffee vendor - Not a great start.
Our position ended up being the least of our worries as we soon came to find out. A lacklustre lineup had lead to very poor ticket sales. By poor, we mean Splendour normally sells out in hours if not, days. This year not only was it not sold out, there were 15,000 less people there. So we had work to do and did our best to get people to our stall.
We pushed through three and a half days of slow but consistent trade. We served hot coffee (batch brew) and food (baked goods and koeksisters) for the first time which we will continue to do at specific events and in the winter. We also sold our new coffee beans, shirts and stickers which are now available on our site. We didn't see the lines we have in the past, we weren't flat out or panicking about running out of of stock, but we met heaps of happy people and enjoyed the beautiful weather and some great acts when we could.
On the last day we wrapped up early and got the whole crew to the Mix up stage for PNAU! As always, they were epic. We then saw out the festival at the Tipi Forrest.
With all that said and the negatives aside Tyla and I managed to get 5 of our best mates together for a great weekend. We are so lucky to have the community we do surrounding this business of ours and to you legends, you know who you are, you are incredibly special to us - THANK YOU!
We look forward to our next event, taking with us the lessons we have learned from this weekend and with a new setup - more to come on this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Lastly, dont forget to take the time to chill, bru.
Nick