An Open Letter: To the Creative Community
Hello Gluggers,
With the recent announcement of our latest London event, we thought it might be a good opportunity to tell you a bit more about our plans for Glug, to explain why we sometimes make the choices we do and most importantly to thank everyone who’s ever been to one of our events.
Ian and I set Glug up some 7 years ago (photos), and at the time it was simply a meeting of friends who happened to all share a love of design and creativity. As time went by and the number of ‘Gluggers’ increased, we realised there was also a ‘thirst for knowledge’ — people wanted to see fellow creatives showcasing their work and ideas and be inspired.
Talks take the form of a creative showcase — normally with a large room, seats ideally and a big screen to showcase the work. The ‘Notworking’ is a super-informal way for people from like-minded backgrounds to hang out and have fun. We try our best to maintain the basic format for Glug; A 50/50 split of talks & ‘Notworking’ (both naturally involving a few drinks). We’ve been lucky enough to host the cream of creative talent over the years with the likes of North Kingdom, Wolf Ollins, United Visual Artists, Google Creative Lab, Tomato, Mr Bingo, Kate Moross, Serial Cut, OneDotZero, Man V Machine, Anthony Burrill & B-Reel. The list goes on (not fully updated).
We sometimes get criticised that the networking aspect of the events isn’t formalised, but to us that’s sort of the point. One of the reasons we set Glug up was in response to the awkward, forced experiences you get elsewhere. For us it’s important that you can choose to spend the evening with your friends or meet new people. The key thing is that if you do put yourself out there, the likelihood is you’ll meet someone with a common interest. We do try to encourage this and will certainly give more of a focus to it going forward.
As the popularity of the event has risen it’s sometimes been hard to keep everyone happy. Finding a big enough room to seat 500+ people, whilst also having other spaces to let people mingle and chat isn’t easy.
We’ve always tried to keep the cost of attending our events down to the absolute minimum. We often see similar industry events being advertised with high ticket prices sometimes in the hundreds of pounds, and we don’t think that’s right. Often the people who want to attend are young creatives who don’t have the sort of disposable income to be able to afford large prices, more beer money is a good thing, right? As such we always try to ensure our sponsors pay the majority of the costs and the rest from ticket sales after the overhead deductions such as AV hire, event staff and contractor costs, security and all the other running costs in the hope that we break even. The Glug community pays the lowest ticket price we can afford, just to note we also don’t take a penny from the events personally.
We’ve recently announced a new Glug London event, which we hope will try to solve many of the niggles people have had with our London showcase. It’s been 6 months in the making, but now we feel that with the new super exciting collaboration with House of Vans we finally have the venue we’ve dreamed of. A venue large enough to accommodate everyone and everything we can throw at it for you. The venue consists of a huge room for the design talks, another cinema room to showcase purely film and motion work, an exhibition space and a plethora of other rooms and spaces for people to hang out and drink. There’s even a skatepark, boom!
The other thing we’re very excited about is that thanks to the very kind crew at House of Vans we’re going to be able to offer this event for FREE, yup, FREE. The first 500/1000 Tickets were available from our Meetup page on Friday 26th June @ 10am, the second batch goes out on Friday 3rd July @ 10am. Please be warned we expect these to go very, very quickly, the first batch went in 4 mins & 30 seconds!
We can’t promise that a free event will be repeated. We’re very likely to have to charge in the future, whether we move venues or even if we run follow-up events at House of Vans. But it does feel good to give something back this time — we wish we could do this more often! One thing we would ask, is please only take a ticket if you’re 100% able to attend, and if your circumstances change last minute, please swap tickets on Twitter with the #glugtickets or cancel your RSVP, that way people on the waiting list will be able to come.
Glug has come along way since the small and tipsy days of 2008. We now have five events in the UK and six more overseas; London, New York, Beijing, Auckland, Brighton, Birmingham, Stockholm, Leeds, Edinburgh, with Oxford and Liverpool launching soon, also in 2016 we’re trying to launch in another six new countries.
Now that we have a formula for the way these work, we’re looking to allow more people to take the brand and concept and open in countries all over the world. If you’re reading this and you fancy setting up your own Glug event — wherever you might be in the world — please get in touch with us at glugevents@gmail.com, please do the same if you’d like to talk or sell some wares, or even volunteer at one of our events, it’s a great profile builder and for people getting into the industry it will always look good on your CV to be part of the team that helps us creatively evolve and promote UK/worldwide creative businesses without boundaries.
All we ask is that you love and care about design and creativity, keep supporting us for which we’re eternally thankful for and enjoy the events we curate for you. Support is always welcome and your voice is always heard within the team, without you; the guys and girls that come to our events, speak, sell, make, do and especially those that take the time to put on and host the local events, we are nothing.
Get your free ticket from Friday 03.07.15 at 10am from here, follow us on twitter to find out more and please join us at one of our future events to be intoxicated and inspired by this wonderful industry that we’re part of. And to see some of our videos please go here.
Thanks again for supporting Glug, it means a lot to us.
Glug on Twitter.
Find a Glug event close to you here.
