Events · 2025
Taking a festival's vendor and volunteer intake out of the inbox
An annual folk festival in the Toronto area was running vendor, artist, volunteer and sponsor intake over email, on a static site nobody but a developer could change. We rebuilt it as an application platform the organising team runs themselves.
- Applications in one season
- 269
- Unique visitors, peak month
- 8,500
- Cache hit rate
- 92%
The challenge
The festival coordinates around 120 vendor stalls, dozens of artists, a volunteer team and its sponsors, and none of that intake touched the website. Applications arrived by email and lived in inboxes, so there was no central record of who had applied or been approved. The site itself was static: a schedule change or a new event detail needed a developer, so information went stale rather than getting updated. There was no gallery, and no dependable way to tell the public anything.
What we did
We rebuilt the site to the festival's own design direction on Laravel, with an Inertia.js and React front end - reactive where it needed to be, without splitting a seasonal site into a separate API and client to maintain. Vendors, artists, volunteers and sponsors now apply through validated forms, and every submission lands in an admin dashboard the organising team reviews itself. Around that sit a day-by-day performer schedule, a countdown, a public gallery and Google Maps directions to the venue. The demanding part was responsive behaviour against a fixed festival date: a vendor filling in an application is doing it on a phone, and that had to work as well as the desktop view. Blank slate to production ran one to two months.
The outcome
269 applications came through in a single season - 163 vendors, 42 artists, 63 volunteers, plus sponsors - all in one place rather than scattered across inboxes. In a recent month the site served over 8,500 unique visitors and 176,000 requests, comfortably inside festival-season traffic. The team has come back each season since to update dates and event details themselves, which is the part that matters: it is a tool they run, not a project that was delivered and shelved.
Tell us what is not working
A thirty-minute call, no deck and no obligation. You will leave with a straight answer about whether this is worth building - including if that answer is no.