From our launch as the UK’s first transactional marketplace for meeting, offsite and event Spaces four years ago to launching HeadBox in Ireland earlier this year, the HeadBox team has celebrated a whole host of “Founding Moments”.
The first founding moment came from the frustration of trying to book a creative Space. An endless stream of phone calls, emails, forms and contracts led our Founder and CEO, Andrew Needham, to search for a better, simpler and more efficient way to finding an event space, and soon the idea of HeadBox was born. Since then, founding moments have been coming thick and fast.
So, as we prepare to begin year 5 of our mission to reinvent the global events industry through technology, it seemed the perfect time to take stock of our story so far. Here, we take a look back at four more historic founding moments in the HeadBox journey.
Our first online booking
October 2015 was the first momentous occasion for HeadBox as we received an online booking for the very first time! A prestigious London based architectural firm take the honour as the first company to make a booking on the platform for the modest total of £250.
The booking confirmation dropped in our Inbox at 9.15am on a Monday morning, whilst the team we’re conducting their Monday kick off in Pret A Manger in Soho and it was official, HeadBox was live and we haven’t looked back since.
A Business client jumps onboard
As the online bookings started to roll in we began to uncover a wide range of problems with venue finding and event planning that happen at a company-wide level. The lack of standardised contracts, onboarding multiple suppliers for one event, a lack of data centralisation and control across the MICE budgets, totalling millions of pounds in many instances, is to name just a few. And so, HeadBox Business was born, our Strategic Meetings and Event Management proposition enabling whole companies to manage, control and streamline their entire meeting and event spend.
Dentsu Aegis Network were the first HeadBox Business client to put pen to paper back in early 2016. Their first HeadBox event was a Women in Leadership event at Hampshire’s beautiful Tilney Hall. Almost four years on, Dentsu remain our longest HeadBox Business client to date and we are now proud to service hundreds of events for them each year across all of the agencies within their network, the most recent being ‘DAN Live’, their annual staff conference which was attended by 2000 Guests.
Setting our sights on Europe
A year of strong growth led to another BIG founding moment for HeadBox at the end of 2018, as £4M in funding led by Guinness Asset Management enabled us to plan our expansion into Europe.
With big ambitions to reinvent the global events industry through technology, and with the HeadBox team having grown from 17 to 52 since the start of the year, the funding was an important and significant milestone for the company. It meant a groundbreaking 2019 lay before us and it has not failed to disappoint.
HeadBox launches in the Emerald Isle
That investment helped provide another HUGE founding moment for the company in April of this year as we launched in Ireland. Iconic locations such as Croke Park, the Guinness Storehouse, Jameson Distillery and Aviva Stadium were amongst the first Irish venues to be added to the HeadBox platform as we introduced 800 superb Spaces across Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
The launch in Ireland represented HeadBox’s first international location outside of the UK and we’re certainly not about to stop there! 1,200 unique Spaces are set to go live on HeadBox from across The Netherlands this month with more major European cities to be added in 2020. So, watch this Space because we’ve now localised our platform and software which means it is now ready to launch anywhere in the world in a matter of days!
So there you have it, four momentous HeadBox moments that we have celebrated over the last four years. But at HeadBox, we aren’t ones for looking back. There is plenty more to come over the next 12 months, so check out our blog on the 5 things we are looking forward to in 2020.
