New stuff, our thoughts on the 2021 Marquee Hire season
It’s hard to start a blog without talking about the impact COVID-19 has had on the events and marquee hire industry and we’ve been in constant talks with our customers over the last 12 months or more. Like life the pandemic hasn’t been fair, everybody has been affected some more so than others. We have lost out significantly, luckily most of our customers have postponed and we are massively grateful for that as it has guaranteed the survival of our business. There have been campaigns online about how the events industry has been forgotten about. It’s difficult to know where to stand. Although it could be said it’s unfair hospitality has been able to restart at scale while weddings and events have had to wait. Outdoor hospitality may restart on the 12th of April and large events with possibly thousands will start from the 17th of May. While weddings at usual numbers will have to wait until the 21st June at least.
However, you have to remember we are dealing with emotional events, once in a lifetime events where social distancing just doesn’t happen. Luckily we have been benefited from governments grants, the furlough scheme, council grants and the bounceback loan. Our business has always grown around our family so fortuitously our overheads are small. We don’t have large overheads. It was sad that Papa Kata ceased trading, they were someone in the industry we always looked up to. The juggernaut York-based Tipi company and subject of BBC’s panorama where they looked at Yorkshire based businesses were huge so the pandemic obviously hit them harder. Although they were a tipi company they were someone we were aware of early in the planning and we always envied their brand and reputation. I’m sure with their experience they will still continue to do good things.
Back to us if we don’t grow we go backwards so we are cautiously optimistic about the future and have taken steps to build for it and we are looking to increase our marquee hire capacity so we have purchased some new HEX marquees which are available to hire from this year. Whilst we love our Trapeze marquees we have always struggled to operate on hard standing so our new tents will enable us to begin to explore this possibility. In keeping with our love for modular marquees and giving people amazing events for reasonable prices. Plus we think they look cool.
We had a bit of a mad idea to make a TV stand out of this stillage some racking was delivered on so here we are! We think it’s an elegant way to bring a screen into a venue though. We are going to connect via HDMI lead. Some uses we think might work if you plug a laptop in.
- Seating plan
- iMovie photo slide thing
- Show the football on it if England ever got the final of the world cup final
We’ve also increased our stock of rustic tables and bought some folding wooden chairs. These are all available to hire on our Furniture Hire page.
Wedding Suppliers
We are also working on our marquee hire website. We have done some small tweaks behind the scenes to make the website more mobile-friendly. We also want to bring back our recommended page so if= you are wedding suppliers in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire it would be great to build reciprocal relationships and links.