From a wine bar in Century City in 2009, to BRAND POPUP, we’ve spent years doing the work that makes a few hours together possible. Somehow, it made us want to start a magazine, too.
Putting an event together is hard. Like, really fucking hard.
Before anyone walks through the door, you have to answer a deceptively simple question: Why should this event exist?
Then comes the next one: Who is it for?
Get those two wrong, and the venue, the speakers, the lighting, and the beautiful photos won’t save you. You need a concept people care about and a reason for them to give you their time. Because that’s what you’re asking for: an evening they could spend somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else.
Once you’ve figured that out, the questions multiply.
When? Where? What’s the budget? Indoor or outdoor? Does the venue have chairs and tables? What about lighting, projectors, parking? Can people actually get there without arriving annoyed?
If there’s a speaking session, you have another job entirely. Who has something worth saying to this particular audience? Will people care enough to listen? And will those speakers trust you enough to show up and speak to a room of people who may not know them?
Then come audio and video. Photography. Food. Snacks. Drinks.
And now you have to get people there.
You publish articles. Create social content. Reach out to bloggers and vloggers. Follow up. Follow up again. Keep the venue updated every week. Get coffee with a speaker. Schedule a lunch. Take a call so that, by event day, you’ve built a relationship with the person you’re handing a microphone to.
The guests get a few hours. You’ve been living with the event for weeks.
We’ve been doing some version of this since 2009.
Our first Schmoozd event was at a wine bar in Century City. Two hundred people showed up. That took a mad amount of marketing, and we still remember what it meant to get those people into that room.
That first event gave us something we’ve carried ever since: respect for the effort behind attendance. Every person who shows up has made a choice. You owe them a reason to be glad they came.
Over the years, Schmoozd became our education in bringing people together, especially in tech. We learned how much the audience shapes the conversation, how much preparation goes into a good speaker session, and how many small decisions affect whether people feel comfortable enough to meet someone new.
So when people ask us whether they should produce an event, we tell them the truth.
You have to love it.
Thinking it looks cool will get you through the announcement. Enjoying the actual work is what gets you through the weeks that follow.
When we launched BRAND POPUP this year, we brought all that experience with us. We also had a lot to learn about where this particular idea would lead.
We almost stumbled into it.
What emerged was a gathering that brands, especially those in consumer packaged goods, or CPG, wanted to be part of. BRAND POPUP became a go-to social event for a community we were getting to know, and we loved getting to know it.
There’s something especially immediate about bringing consumer brands into a room. These are products people can taste, touch, try, and ask questions about. A beverage has a flavor. A snack has a texture. A founder has a reason they spent so much time getting something just right.
In person, those details have somewhere to go.
That matters in today’s CPG market. Consumers have plenty of choices, and a recognizable name doesn’t automatically win the purchase. NielsenIQ’s 2025 global research found that 58% of respondents were expanding their brand purchases across categories, while 68% considered private-label products good alternatives to name brands. For emerging brands, that suggests both opportunity and pressure: people are open to trying something different, but you have to give them a reason to choose you. NielsenIQ’s global consumer research
A live event gives a brand a chance to make its case through an actual experience. Someone can try the product, ask about an ingredient, hear the thinking behind it, and decide for themselves whether it belongs in their life.
The wider events industry is seeing evidence of that interest. Sparks and Event Marketer’s EventTrack 2026 study reports that 61% of consumers are more inclined to purchase after attending a live event. That’s reported purchase inclination, so it doesn’t mean every sample becomes a sale. It does help explain why brands continue to invest in meeting people face-to-face. EventTrack 2026
For us, the opportunity is also social.
People need something to talk about, and discovering a product together gives them a natural place to start. A question turns into a conversation. A founder gets to explain something that would never fit on a label. Someone encounters a brand they weren’t looking for.
Our job is to create the conditions for that to happen: choose an audience thoughtfully, give the brands room to tell their stories, and handle enough of the details that people can relax and participate.
That’s where all the supposedly boring work earns its place.
The sound matters because people need to hear. The layout matters because people need to move. The speaker preparation matters because an audience can feel when a conversation has been considered. The venue updates matter because the people helping you host should know what’s happening.
We care about that work because we care about what it makes possible.
And the more we worked on BRAND POPUP, the more we wanted to spend time with the stories behind the brands.
An event has a closing time. There’s only so much you can discover during one evening, and only so much a founder can explain between introductions.
That’s what made a magazine feel like a natural next step.
We loved BRAND POPUP enough to turn it into a magazine paired with an IRL event. A place to spend more time with the products, the people building them, and the ideas shaping how we live.
The magazine gives us room to go deeper. The event lets people encounter those stories in person. Someone can read about a brand and arrive curious. Someone else can discover it at an event and leave wanting to learn more.
For us, that connection is worth building.
We didn’t leave that wine bar in Century City in 2009 knowing we would eventually create a consumer-brand magazine with a live event attached. We kept producing gatherings, learning from the people who came, and finding reasons to do it again.
BRAND POPUP grew out of that same willingness to put in the work and see where a good room could take us.
There are still chairs to count. Speakers to call. Articles to finish. Venue updates to send. There’s still a whole lot to do before the doors open.
Do we love producing events? Fuck yeah, we do.
Do we love the grunt work? Fuck yeah, we do.
Do we have fun? Fuck yeah.
And when the room fills up, we remember exactly why.