Luma Lounge: The Evolution
Way back in 2016 brought our first pop up bar at a now legendary annual Queenstown event, Luma. Luma is a light festival mainly activated around the Queenstown Gardens, and is now starting to creep in to the depths of town, it’s a platform for national art creators to play with ideas in this magical light garden, and is an immersive experience for visitors to come and enjoy. It’s a 4 day festival over the Queens birthday weekend in late may/ early June, and attract around 55,000 customers.
The World Bar was given the opportunity to be part of Luma, by being the heart of the Luma Lounge, a small liquor licensed area within the gardens for everyone to enjoy a bite to eat and drink on their journey.
Now i’ll be honest, the first year we where unprepared and blown away, I was assisting our then event manager (Suzy Larsen) in our pop up, consisting of a 4x4 Marquee, BBQ for burgers, slow cooker mulled wine and just the 2 of us. Boy we where unprepared for the amount of people that would be stopping by, the whole weekend consisted of running back and forth to the bar for more stock, luke warm mulled wine, pulling in a chef and a lot of the F word, never fear we where not deterred we came back more prepared and ready to smash it out the park in the following years!
Since then every year has expanded, and has brought in new and exciting activations with in the Luma Lounge. In the lounge we would cover bar offerings, food offerings and most theming elements of the area. Ensuring that as a whole it was cohesive and enjoyable.
2017 - Suzy and I where at it again, this time we brought in an extra bar with a partnership with Spieghts and had a small team to help us through the long weekend. Still Mulled wine seemed to be our best seller and we just hadn’t been able to nail to process!
2018 - We expand again and Suzy got a little bit of new’s, she was pregnant, here was my chance to take on some more responsibility and step up my game. We had moved to a new location in the gardens and had even more brands onboard, Emersons, Corona and Bombay Sapphire, this year we had a new process for mulled wine, pre batching. Suzy and I both spent hours at home and in the kitchen back at the bar making hundreds of litres of mulled wine, it was a challenge, but it worked. Every year we got better, great sponsorships, 3 bars and a great food.
2019 - Going Solo. My first year in the helm of Luma. So why not go bigger again? After all I love a challenge! By now we had a great frame work so expanding again seemed like the right thing to do, and felt very natural. So this year we ran 4 bars & 2 food stalls, welcoming some new sponsorships from brands such as Mac’s and Bushmills, and expanding the on event team to around 15 staff per night. I also took this year as an opportunity to work with a local company, Crimson Badger, who where able to batch mulled wine and put it in a keg, and provide a set up that could warm up the wine constantly. Haven. 2019 was by far our busiest year, and one of my most challenging events.
Luma has been a catalyst for a lot of my skills, it’s presented extremely hard time’s and has challenged me in many ways. Without it I don’t think i’d be where I am right now. I’m looking forward to Luma 2021 and the new challenges it’ll bring in a post Covid environment.
Come back for the full report on Luma 2021!
