On Friday afternoon, 95 liquor distributors and salespeople sipped specialty cocktails with names such as "Bubble O-Seven" at Palatine's Twin Lakes Golf Course and Recreation Area, where Proximo Spirits hosted an afternoon event to introduce its new product, Three O Bubble Vodka, to the assembled crowd. Lindsey Reisinger, Proximo's area manager for Illinois, enlisted Total Event Resources to produce the happening.
"Our vision for the event was to give the existing space—a tent structure and an outdoor patio overlooking the lake—a fun resemblance to the Three O Bubble vodka marketing campaign," said Sarah Schnell, Total Event Resources' senior program manager. Toward that end, Scnhell and her team brought a bubble machine into the tent, decorated tabletops with pink bottles of bubble solution, and ordered custom napkins with the beverage's logo. Throughout the tent, bubblegum-hued decor included oversize letters that spelled out the name of the new vodka flavor and pink ties on highboys draped in white linens. Schnell noted that these were "cost-effective ways to get the Bubble message across to guests during the event."
Though the tent housed the cocktail reception and a short presentation on the new vodka, the afternoon's agenda also involved an alfresco lunch and outdoor teambuilding activities—which, in a season of extraordinarily gloomy weather, meant that "we had to design two events, one of which was the rain backup plan," said Schnell.
While Plan A would have seen guests lunching on the lakeside terrace, "we had ordered some extra tables and linens, in case we needed to sit everyone under the tent for lunch," said Schnell. And when the skies turned rainy early in the day, the backup plan went into effect. "There was enough room in the tent—it just wasn't how we'd originally planned to start things off," said Schnell.
Total Event Resources also designed four indoor-activity alternatives to the outdoor games they had planned, which included volleyball, paddle boat rides, and competitions on the recreation area's driving range and putting green. Because the rain let up halfway through the event, "we ended up keeping three out of the four activities," Schnell said. "But we did decide to replace the volleyball; the sand on the court was pretty wet and mushy." Instead of heading out to the sodden sand, guests stayed inside the tent to play a bucket-toss game that incorporated logo-bearing buckets; they also stayed busy at a green screen photo booth that printed out images with pink backdrops inspired by Three O Bubble's marketing collateral.
