The WOW! Factor
Author: Carla Breer Howard
April 2007
Smart Perspectives
The phone call the morning after goes something like this: "Marci, that was a terrific event you put together for us. Great job! Can’t wait to see what you do next year."
Congratulations. The way we see it, there’s both good news and bad news here: you’ve raised the bar on the excitement, the energy, the fun and on the effectiveness of the event; in short, it was a wow and you’ve got to surpass it next time.
At our Smart Meetings roundtables, and from talking with you at our industry’s events, you’ve told us again and again that this is one of your biggest professional challenges. The truth is, when it comes to putting the Wow Factor into your next event, you’ve either got to bring it or buy it, but you don’t leave home without it.
We want to help. We asked five of the premier caterers in the West to share their insights and experiences with you. Our team is made up of Dan McCall of McCall Associates in San Francisco; Lisa Dupar of Lisa Dupar Catering in Seattle; Mary Micucci of Along Came Mary in Los Angeles, whose 2007 GRAMMY Celebration Party graces our cover; Nicole Marsh of The Arrangers DMC in Denver; and Philip Richardson of Current Affairs in Honolulu. Every one of them has been over this road and come up with something new at a critical time that was jaw-dropping fabulous.
That’s powerful stuff. You know how it feels when you see a gorgeous harvest moon, a devastatingly attractive member of the opposite (or same?) sex, or walk into a room that transports you to a magical place…in that moment, out of your mouth, without conscious thought, it comes: "Wow."
It’s in your hands to make that happen.
Dan McCall,
McCall Associates,
San Francisco, Calif.
Dan McCall started his career right out of Cornell Hotel School, becoming director of catering at San Francisco’s legendary Hotel St. Francis in 1973. He left in 1980 to start his own firm. McCall’s strength was always his solid understanding of how to make events work. "I knew to ask: What’s this room going to look like and how is this party going to work? I could hear the music. I knew the guests would think ‘I danced tonight; the lighting was wonderful; those flowers were beautiful and the food was delicious."
The approach was effective. McCall Associates has made The Emperor of Japan, Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret; his Royal Highness Prince Philip and the President of China feel welcome. A few from the impressive client roster include JPMorgan Chase, BancAmerica and Goldman Sachs; the Building Industry Advisory Council and the Financial Planners Association; Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. Today McCall Associates has 110 employees, over half of whom have been with the firm for over a decade.
AT THE START: INFORMATION GATHERING
Any McCall event begins with a conversation with the client to find out who is coming and what the party’s mission is. "We understand that the party has a mission," Dan McCall says. "While we are a caterer, we also know that nobody in his right mind comes to a party for 5,000 to eat the food!"
By finding out who is coming to the event, McCall representatives can begin thinking about how this particular group is going to react, what’s going to make it all work. "Once you have those two pieces of information, you can start creating the event," he says.
The conversation also clarifies the budget; from that, the team can build priorities. Plus, this is the time to determine the event's location. "And if the client doesn’t know," says McCall, "to suggest where you think it should be."
LAYOUTS AND SCHEDULES
At this point, says McCall, you lay out the party so the party can function. "The service of the food has to follow the flow of the party; the timing is so essential. People have to be served in a timely manner, or it won’t be a wow anymore."
Next is determining what goes where, to make that timing work. The floor plan is essential for successful flow, McCall says. "We have scale plans of every place in the Bay Area and if they don’t have one, we send a designer out to make a precise plan to scale." From this, the team decides where to put seating and tables for cocktails, the bars, the sizing and shape of the dining tables, the capacity of the room, where the entertainment will be, and so on.
With this information, you can prioritize how to make the party be the most that it can be, he says. "All parties—it doesn’t matter how big they are—have limitations. It’s making the most of what you’ve got."
THE BASICS
"Fundamentally, if you feed people and light them so they look beautiful, they feel good about themselves at the end of the night; they become sexy. You’re appealing to the human basics," McCall says.
Playing on those human basics begins with great lighting. "You can’t take someone 50 or 60 years old and put them in fluorescent light," he observes. "You need what is known as ‘kind light.'" McCall’s favorite lighting gel is called Mayan Sun, a pinkish amber hue, which makes everyone look suntanned and relaxed.
The next McCall essential is to provide plenty of food. "If you’re doing a cocktail party, it takes about 17 hunks of hors d’oeuvres and 3 sweet things on average per person, possibly with a little wastage. People are always so surprised by this. Before you even get into the wow of the party, you need enough food."
SETTING THE SCENE
Now is the time to inject the pizzazz. First is the arrival: "You have to appeal to the senses from the get-go, and you have to make that entry easy to approach and then transition into the party," McCall explains. "The first thing we do is put a drink in their hands." This prevents clumping at the bar. Nice.
Second, when you decorate, McCall says to start with the center. "It has to have something important in it. It can be flowers; it can be entertainment; it can be art, or living statues, but there needs to be something that huddles the party together and still draws guests in." The easiest way to center the room, he says, is to put in a great big floral piece. And you surround that middle, often by building a bar around it. “I don’t like big food stations," McCall comments. "They get a little shopworn over time. I like to use fairly small buffets and put someone there keeping it fresh."
When it comes to decorative items, McCall opts first for flowers. "I think flowers are the best; they’re easy to deal with and they’re natural," he says.
Presentation is foremost. "When you hire a rock band, hire a cheaper band and light them correctly," McCall advises. "Present everything you’ve got this way, make everything look better than it really is."
McCall likes the music to be pretty, soft, so you can talk over it. If it’s a young group, the music can be hip, he says, but not so loud you can’t talk over it.
SUSTAINING THE WOW FACTOR
"The world can take about 90 minutes, and then they want to do something else," McCall says. So how do you wow again that same night?
"You’ll reveal into another room where you’ve laid out something else," he says. "So in one room you might have a sax band, muted, soft, acoustical, with no microphones; pretty. Then you open up doors and you look over to the right and there’s an orchestra. It’s a new setting, with lots of tables and people can stay and sit down and eat, and eventually there’s a performance in this second room. And then back in the first room, they have a piano and the dessert buffet."
"There’s a third room that’s a disco with an all-white floor, black and white stripes on the wall and white lounges. Maybe it’s like the disco at the Delano in South Beach, a wafting white fabric and wood look. As you go from one to the next there are new adventures, new music, new food; it’s a surprise, you come back in and something else is happening."
"You’re thinking up front, What’s going to make them think 'That was a cool gig to go to.'"
Lisa Dupar
Lisa Dupar Catering,
Seattle, Wash.
Lisa Dupar is first and foremost a chef. Desmond Tutu, President Bill Clinton, the President of Thailand, Prince Andrew, the Sheik of Dubai, Ted Turner, and such potentially intimidating foodies as the late Julia Child and Martha Stewart have dined on Lisa Dupar’s cooking. She has been Microsoft’s preferred vendor for a decade and she did the four-course sit-down dinner for the 500 guests at Bill and Melinda Gates’ wedding reception in Seattle.
The business was founded in 1984 and Dupar has recently branched out with her own restaurant in Redmond, called Pomegranate Bistro. Her fulltime team of 60 handles nearly 1,400 events a year. Her specialties are classic French, true Southern-comfort foods (Dupar hails from Atlanta) and Pacific Northwest cuisines. Perhaps Archbishop Tutu put it most eloquently in a thank-you note: "You must tell the chef I haven’t enjoyed chicken as delicious as I had tonight. Oh, yum, yum, yum. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
HER APPROACH
Lisa Dupar works carefully to hear her client’s wishes before the event. "Since we’re caterers and we’re responding to a client’s vision, I really need to pull out of them what they envision for their perfect event," she says. "It’s amazing; some say food quality is all that matters to them. Others will say 'I don’t care about the food much; whatever you do will be just fine but it’s got to be drop-dead the moment they walk in.'"
GOING WITH THE THEME
The chef understands the interrelationship of menu to theme. "I could go gung ho and create the best food ever," Dupar says, “but unless it responds to the theme, it doesn’t work."
The company is working on an upcoming local hospital fundraiser, a sit-down dinner for 700 in May with an Italian Carnivale theme. "They said to me, 'If your menu is something like grilled salmon from the Northwest, we don’t want to use you.'" So Dupar goes the extra step: "It’s wrapping your head around Italy and Carnivale. I surround myself with books and pictures," she says of her immersion. But it’s also paying close attention to the best of the season. For this event, which will take place at the height of Washington State’s strawberry season, she is creating a panna cotta, an Italian pudding, served with the fruit and topped with a basalmic vinegar, served semifreddo (or partially frozen). Yum, yum, yum.
FOOD FIRST, THEN THE DESIGN
"My inspiration is always the food—food first and then design after," Dupar reveals. "I’m always thinking 'what would blow them away, what’s in season.'"
The greatest challenge is when the event’s reason for being is a bit abstract, like one Dupar did for the opening of a high-end condominium development right on the Seattle waterfront. Parts of the building were still in construction, but that did not faze her clients. "They wanted everything for the party to be construction-related, like PVC piping and metal pieces and wires," Dupar recalls. "They basically had their contractors give us the table décor; we used PVC pipes for risers on top of the silver tablecloths. We’re using construction materials on our buffet."
Mary Micucci and Eric Weiss
Along Came Mary (ACM),
Los Angeles
Mary Micucci founded her company in 1975 from the back of a Volkswagon bug. "I had no dreams or aspirations," she says, "it was in the cards, being from an Italian family; food was so important to us. I’ve always had a love affair with food."
Micucci’s turning point came when Paramount Studios hired her to cater a premiere. "The theatrical side of me came out after that big party I did for Popeye in 1980. That’s when I thought, it’s not just going to be about food anymore. This is so much more fun!" And she picked it up all on her own. "My BA was in communications; I guess that worked out well for communicating with people!"
The scope of the ACM client list is truly overwhelming. Not only has she created events for every Hollywood studio and most major media companies, but ACM also numbers among their clients: Barney’s New York, Cartier, Kodak, Hilton Hotels, Moet Hennessy, Coca-Cola, Nike, Nordstrom, Yves St. Laurent, Vanity Fair, Toyota, Louis Vuitton, Merrill Lynch, World Cup Soccer and Wells Fargo Bank. Then, she’s produced the premiere parties for most of the major films of the past two decades.
A CASE STUDY: THE 2007 GRAMMY CELEBRATION
ACM did the 2007 GRAMMY Celebration Party—her eighth post-awards gala for the organization—in a 90,000-square-foot room with a 50-foot ceiling inside the Los Angeles Convention Center. That’s empty space at its most naked and demanding.
The team transformed it into an Asian underground nightscape, complete with a Zen evening garden effect underscored by 25-foot tall miniature forests of fresh bamboo. Elevated lounge areas with ottomans and banquettes accented by silken toss pillows were tucked in behind latticed grates. These were further surrounded by bars.
Similarly, dinner tables were set up under tent-like pavilions, covered in cloths of gold, turquoise or vermillion. Take it from me, it was a WOW.
Eric Weiss, ACM’s executive vice president, explains the process for the typical GRAMMY party. "Every year Branden Chapman (Branden Chapman, Recording Academy vice president, production & process management) starts us off with an idea. He’ll say, 'This year I want it to be about the four seasons.' Another year it was the elements: earth, air, fire and water. Brandon’s inspiration this year was the Janet Jackson If video. That’s what led us to come up with this Asian underground club scene."
As guests first arrived after the ceremony, they were entering the Zen garden mode, "So the room felt very calm, lit with amber tones," relates Micucci, "and then we went into Tokyo nights, with lasers, pops of colors, Chaka Kahn performing; suddenly it was a whole different vibe. At the last look the whole room went red, all of our performance artists were dressed in red."
Lighting expertise is essential. "It has always been for me one of the single most important elements," says Micucci. "To have it look beautiful, you need a day to be able to light a party. I like amber; I always have. We use so many color palettes depending on the party, though: reds, blue, purples, but for the events that are a little more formal, we use amber."
In the course of producing the 2007 GRAMMY party, ACM developed the food for what was ultimately a count of 6,000 guests, set out on 75 different buffets that offered a range of seven different cuisines and, as Mary Micucci says, "God knows how many bars (80 to 90, actually)!"
Knowing the lay of the land is essential. Even for a cocktail party for 200 people, the ACM team always goes to the site. Micucci says it’s essential for figuring out where the kitchen will be set up, where the cocktail event or dinner will be. "You go on site inspections, you measure the space, get it on blueprints, and get it approved by the fire department," she says.
The GRAMMY layout was designed for movement. "This is typically different than the more formal events like the Academy Awards," says Weiss. "It’s the record industry; it’s the music industry. They really want to party. They have live music and they want to circulate." Over the last three years ACM has added in performance artists, aerial performers and dragon dancers who come in from Chinatown, as well.
"So everywhere you turn," explains Micucci, "there’s something to engage you, someplace to sit, something to eat, a place to get a drink and look at a performance artist, or at the main stage."
REINVENTION
There’s always a purpose, notes Weiss. "You have to figure out what that purpose is and accentuate it. You might not always have a brand or a theme," he explains, "but you have to reflect the purpose."
It begins with the process: sitting down and brainstorming, blueprinting, rendering, developing the color palettes and the food. "Sometimes," notes Miccuci, "it takes me three months with my chefs to work out a menu that you can cook within this space, while maintaining quality control so it will be delicious and fun while making the point."
"You have to continue to challenge yourself. In the beginning it was saying 'Oh my God, Paramount is coming back to us!' But it was a completely different movie, suggesting a different theme, maybe the same budget, as good—and hopefully better—than the last. You say, 'OK we’re back to this space, what are we going to do to make it different?'"
The Arrangers, Denver
At spring breaks when she was a student at Colorado State University, Nicole Marsh not only planned her own good times, but also her roommates’ activities. "I’ve always been a planner," she relates. "It’s the thrill of the outcome. You work so hard, then you sit and think to yourself, 'Wow, we did this!' I also get to show off our destination, to enable people have a great experience when they’re in Colorado." The company’s clients have included Fidelity Investments, The Gap, ProLogis, The National Apartment Association, Varian Medical Systems and MPI. Marsh has a fulltime team of 10 to help her achieve that now. Incidentally, this company is the rodeo expert among our five, for a true western experience.
IDEA SOURCES
Marsh begins by asking leading and open-ended questions. "You starting pulling a lot of adjectives from that," she says. "You’re trying to find what worked and didn’t work."
Other inspirations are found in the world around them. "We’re inspired a lot by hot colors and fashion," Marsh says. "Color is a fantastic tool to create focus and energy in the room." However, whether they’re using a monochromatic theme, or going into fun or whimsical color blocking, Marsh says lighting is key. The good news is that it’s becoming more available and cost effective as well. "You can do a lot with linen and lighting," she notes. "LED lights are very popular for doing wall washings, and maybe the focus is on the ceiling and the linens and centerpieces." This is especially true in a big room where any props around the perimeter would just get lost anyway, she says.
"We work very closely with our vendors; we’re looking at pop culture and trends in food. We’re always doing our homework, looking at industry magazines, getting new linens in, and thinking 'Wow, I can’t wait to use this!' When you’re talking with the client, you’re thinking of things you’ve read and seen that would come into play."
KEEPING IT FRESH
When working with repeat clients and events, The Arrangers rely on coming up with a new theme or a new venue as a start. Also, Marsh says they’ll change the style of service from seated to reception. Or they’ll reconsider the table choice, going from square to round or low. "We’ll do new specialty drinks each time," says Marsh, "so that even the attendees are wondering what these will be and look forward to it."
"We have a lot of clients moving more to a dessert party. It’s rather a new area," she says. It’s grown out of the idea that it’s where the host will get the most attendance. "After you’ve gone everywhere else, they’re saying, come to our party, it’s hip, the lounge atmosphere is really hot, there’s a DJ or a full band." As Marsh explains, they’re competing for attendees’ attention for the big conventions. "One doctor might have an invitation to go to five or six events in the same evening," she says. "They’ll stay longer at the last one."
MAKING THE BUDGET GO FURTHER
"We utilize what the venue offers and supplement it," says Marsh. Her strategy is to keep everything on the tables and not have to spend money on décor around the room. Or alternatively, to look for a venue that doesn’t need décor. "We have some fun warehouses and stadiums," she says, also citing Denver’s performing arts complex and the foyer space of the opera house. "Or let the mountains be the backdrop; have something outside where you don’t need to spend the money on décor."
Philip Richardson,
Current Affairs, Honolulu
Canadian-born Philip Richardson moved to England when he was very young. Although he’s lived among us Yanks for decades, he still retains his delightful accent. His company was founded in 1984 and has produced events for (a partial listing, from A to X) the American Bar Association, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Chanel, Chrysler, Citibank, Coca-Cola, Condé Nast Traveler, GTE, Hermès, Jack in the Box, Merrill Lynch, Metropolitan Life, National Geographic, Oracle, Prudential, Sony, Toyota, United Airlines, Visa, Wells Fargo and Xerox. It seems everyone likes to party in Hawaii.
"To get a damn job," Richardson responds with a chuckle, when asked why he started his company 23 years ago. "I couldn’t find one that I would want to do. I had to quit my other job; there was too much about that business that was illicit and wrong, and I quit with one child and one on the way! And good old Tom Peters with his In Search of Excellence came along. Well, I highlighted it page by page, and that’s what we do today. Long hours are not a hardship if you’re enjoying what you’re doing."
GETTING INSPIRED
"For us, there is a blank piece of paper; the challenge is, am I putting my ego on the table? And I have to categorically say no. What we have to put on the table is all derived from what we hear from the client and the expectations of the guests," Richardson says. "We become a sponge for information. The more information we get, the better we can hit the mark of where they want to go." To Richardson, it’s a springboard for the addition of CA’s creative ideas.
"You try to delve deeper; you might go into that company Web site to see if there’s anything in there. You go back to the client’s history and you look at all of the things they’ve done, what they’ve liked and what they’ve not liked, and start building from there."
Richardson puts his team of a dozen around the table and they brainstorm.
Personally, Richardson relies on a simple mechanism: the board on the wall, push-pins holding up diverse inspirations, all related by the fact that they struck a chord. "I’m looking at my board right now. It has magazine clips, neat concepts, ideas to ponder. I can play off of it, spin off of it. Maybe it’s not for today, but who knows who the client is, where there will be a fit?"
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Sometimes the client’s personal interests lead to an idea. "You find they’re musically minded," he says. "It was Microsoft, and we found that the head guys were into music; they play guitar. What’s the next step? You build a band that’s going to work with you on that. Every time you get entertainment and get the corporate members to sit in, to play along, to sing along, it can make all the difference to a party."
Sometimes the industry itself leads to ideas. "Insurance is all about relationships," observes Richardson. "Who do you place your insurance with? It’s someone you feel comfortable with. One of the events we did expressed exactly that; we created an environment for a group of insurance brokers and their clients that was very sociable."
Sometimes the inspiration is as simple as an element of the setting. "We were off doing a site inspection, going from private estate to private estate, and finally we came across this one house that had a big tree with a huge branch that came down," says Richardson. "Can you imagine a silver moon, a cellophane-skirted hula dancer seated in the silver moon, and an orchestra playing the music going back to the early days? We had an MC who recreated an old radio program known as Hawaii Calls where he ‘tuned into the Mainland’ and tuned back again. It just went vintage, all based on that tree."
PASSION IS WHAT COUNTS
"I’m amazed in this busy, busy world how often people just throw it out there, get the job done and move on to the next," Richardson says. "We made a very conscious decision to cut back in the volume of events so we could focus on the passion. If there are menial things to do, pass it on so you can focus on what you need for excellence."
"You get to touch other people’s lives and that’s what this is about."
