Member profile: Blueprint Studios is the ‘architect of events’
By Connie Lannan
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Member profile: Blueprint Studios is the ‘architect of events’

A grand opening for the San Francisco Symphony, a fundraising event for Stanford Health’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, a large-scale corporate meeting for Twitter, a holiday party for Google — these are just a few of the events the team at Blueprint Studios, with locations in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Napa Valley, Calif., has created.

But the large-scale social event scene is just a slice of what Blueprint Studios offers its clients. In addition, the company works on more intimate gatherings and creates virtual and hybrid tradeshows, company meetings and such. While the scope is quite breathtaking, the goal is always the same: to deliver a one-of-a-kind event experience, according to Mircea Manea, principal, who founded the company 23 years ago, and Dominic Venn-Lever, general manager.

To achieve these one-of-a-kind experiences, every endeavor “starts with the creative process,” says Manea, who began his career as a designer in Romania, working first in incentive travel and cruise lines. “We start with concepts and talk about the goals of the event and then we move on to design. Our niche has always been providing the unique products, and we kept in mind that we need to have a designer approach to what we are doing. We kind of built our collection using these concepts. Rentals are the physical aspect of the hardware that goes into all our events, but there is always a bigger story of what we are doing with our rentals.”

The whole idea is to offer a “holistic system of integrated event production that offers end-to-end continuity and efficiency” because the company is “devoted to delivering creative design breakthroughs and trendsetting innovations. After all, it it’s not remarkable, it’s invisible,” as described on the company website. 

To do that, the company has become “the studio of studios,” Venn-Lever says. “We have in-house creative services, in-house production, in-house fabrication, in-house floral, in-house print services and in-house rental, which consists of about 300,000 skews of rental items as well. We also have such a diverse team with many different skill sets. What truly separates us from other brands is if someone comes to us having a backyard event or a corporate event for several thousand people, we can go ahead and assemble the team to support that event. The nice thing is people can tap into one of our studios and services or tap into everything. We have people who come to us as a rental provider. We have people who come to us for creative services, people who come to us for print solutions, people who come to us for fabrication and we have clients where we do everything for them. We can play in those other sandpits very easily and accommodate anyone’s event.”

That ‘studio of studios’ concept offers Blueprint Studios “the ability to be unique but also service high-quantity events with a large number of guests or be there for backyard events — small weddings and meetings, which occurred during the pandemic — as well as a citywide convention that requires a unified look or concept that is carried between multiple events and venues. We have the ability and depth of inventory to do that,” Manea says.

Through the years the company has developed partnerships with sister companies, including Hensley Event Resources, a well-known event rental operation that has been one of the most prominent structure owners serving California’s Bay Area for more than 41 years, and Vident Exhibits, a Las Vegas-based company that specializes in the design and production of corporate environments, including the creation of trade show displays and exhibits.

Key to all Blueprint Studios’ endeavors is “having an entrepreneurial mindset,” Venn-Lever says. “We are solution-oriented. If a client brings us anything, we never see that as a roadblock or obstacle. We see it as an opportunity to be even more creative and create a solution for them. We can do it all from A to Z because of the studios that have been created.”

That mindset and studio structure helped the company “enter 2020 with a forecast for aggressive growth. We had a lot of projects being booked,” Manea says.

Then the coronavirus (COVID-19) hit. “It was obviously a little bit of a shock. It was scary. We came together and then we made a plan to diversify further and explore. We put more emphasis on our creative department. We had the ability to work in software development. We actually took a lot of our clients who were planning live events and turned them into virtual events. Those were successful experiments. We kind of took it one day at a time and had the ability to have enough projects to carry us to this moment. We had the opportunity to adapt when a meeting was possible and was safer. We designed events in the eyes of the pandemic that required a different beverage and meeting experience. We got to experiment with the hybrid concept. We all embarked on this new path as a team,” Manea says.

To strengthen its footing in the virtual space, the company brought in another sister company, Illumeet, which, according to its website, “approaches virtual engagements from space planning and the attendee journey.”

As in other endeavors, when “pivoting into the virtual, we had that entrepreneurial mindset of the organization,” Venn-Lever says. “Many companies that went into that space were tech-driven. What separated us was coming from the world of live events — that user experience and journey mapping and trying to understand what the client was trying to create from their event. Bringing that same mindset into virtual, I think, was very new and unique and different to a lot of these tech companies that have a product and a service, like Zoom, but it doesn’t truly connect with the audience member.”

Venn-Lever says that when the company moved to the virtual arena, “we had the same design briefs, the same conversations with our clients to truly understand what they were trying to create. The difference was that behind the scenes we built an entire ecosystem of applications and services that we could build into these virtual events. Rather than saying, ‘Here is our virtual platform and let’s host your event,’ we take that virtual ecosystem and custom-design that virtual event for them and really work with our clients to enable them to fundraise and connect with that audience. Our approach is holistic. Now we are seeing the world pivot into that hybrid space where you can have the live event and the virtual event and bring them together. I believe we are the only organization in that space because we have that virtual arm and the live arm is still there, too. We can perfectly marry those two and marry that experience for the attendees, which I think is special.”

The company made significant investments in this new realm. “We used that time to implement new software and new systems to make sure we gave our teams the tools they need to be successful. I don’t think there was a system we didn’t replace and integrate and work alongside,” Venn-Lever says. “We used that pause in time to make sure the company came back in a stronger position before the next chapter of growth vs. wanting to come out of the pandemic. We heard many people say they just want things to go back to normal, the way they were. Our mindset was, no, we want to get ready for whatever the new normal was going to be that we would create.”

The goal was to “make sure we were a bigger, better company with the mindset of being able to support our clients and being better off as an organization to support them and support their needs as well,” Venn-Lever says. “Now that the team has come back online, they have more toys and bells and whistles and production software that doesn’t replace that human social interaction. It gives them the tools so they don’t have to be administrators. The software can take care of that component so we can focus on the fun stuff of being creative, being entrepreneurial and being solution-oriented.”

Through the pandemic, the company also helped its clients with space planning and COVID solutions. “We used our print shop and fabrication division to make social distancing stickers for the floors, signage and notifications. We also provided fabrication solutions and long-term furniture rentals to restaurants that were looking at buildouts for outside seating accommodations,” Venn-Lever adds.

While the company is leaner since the pandemic, with about 150 employees compared with 300 pre-pandemic, it is well-situated, with technology an ever-present factor in its ecosystem, making it ready for even more growth, Manea and Venn-Lever say.

“All our departments are integrated into our software system. The need to adopt technology is part of our life right now — everything we are doing. We love the cloud because it allows us to be on the go, on different devices and access information in real time. I think that has been our solution for a lot of our problems. At the end of the day, though, the human factor is something that makes and breaks it. We like technology for productivity, but at the end of the day it is about human connection and the service that we get face to face with,” Manea says.

Venn-Lever agrees. “The pandemic reinforced the fact that we are social beings — coming together and wanting that social interaction. It almost adds that different level of importance and gives a new elevated kind of passion to what we are doing and makes us want to push that envelope more for those attending the events we are part of,” he says.

As the company website says, Blueprint Studios is “the architect of events,” but for Manea and Venn-Lever it is much more.

“We are group of talented individuals who have stayed humble. Our humbleness is an opportunity to learn and listen to what the industry and our clients are asking or challenging us with. We live to create and reinvent ourselves. We would love to work with different clients and expand our experience in the marketplace because we are part of a bigger picture and story. We want to play our part successfully,” Manea says.

Connie Lannan

Connie LannanConnie Lannan

Connie Lannan is special projects editor for Rental Management. She helps plan, coordinate, write and edit ARA’s quarterly regional newsletters, In Your Region. She also researches, writes and edits news and feature articles for Rental Management, Rental Pulse, supplements, special reports and other special projects. Outside of work, she loves to bake for others, go for walks with her husband and volunteer for her church and causes she believes in.

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