The $800 per ticket, council-funded festival of ‘creative collisions’ has been cancelled and the company behind it has gone bust. Alex Casey reports.

The first problem was that nobody knew how to say it. Without any discernible vowels, pronouncing WLG-X, the name of a five day festival of “creative collisions” planned for September of this year, quickly became a creative collision of its own. “We started off calling it ‘Wellington X’,” explained organiser Terri van Schooten. “Then it evolved to ‘Welly X’ and now some people are just calling it ‘Well X’.

“We wanted it to find its own name.”

However you say it, the festival – which received significant council funding – will never happen. The company created to run it has gone into liquidation, owing at least $186,000. The announcement came after a postponement in 2018 and has disappointed many in the broader events community, raising questions over the council’s investment strategy in future big ticket events in the capital city.

Billed as encompassing tech, film, music and design, WLG-X was self-described as the first of its kind in New Zealand. Organised by Terri Van Schooten and business partner Ray Salter, the festival was charging $799 for a five day ticket. “We’re not just expecting people to show up, watch a film or go to a gig and then go home,” a press release read at the time. “They’re going to meet with new people, make amazing connections and have a complete experience.

“It’s why we’re saying that WLG-X will be filled with creative collisions.”

With over 20 years in events and experience running the Wellington Sevens in its infancy, Van Schooten said she was inspired by the convergent media festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in Texas. “Around the world there are festivals that span multiple topics, different areas, play host to leaders in a range of fields and bring people together, South by Southwest is the pinnacle of these. New Zealand will be getting its own version in November this year,” she said in the 2018 release.

An “extensive” feasibility study was run in 2016 to test the market against the idea. It was paid for in part by WellingtonNZ, the economic development agency 80% owned by the Wellington City Council and 20% by the Regional Council, tasked with “advancing the prosperity, vibrancy and liveability” of the region. Van Schooten was encouraged by the initial response to the study. “It was a very positive outcome… the study came back saying that everyone was excited and saw it as a great opportunity.”

Wellington City Council has refused to say how much it has invested in the failed “signature event” of a festival, citing confidentiality, but did confirm it had made two of the five allocated payments.

“WLG-X would have showcased Wellington’s innovative creative sectors of tech, design, film and music,” said a Wreda spokesperson, explaining that a “successful, cutting-edge event” would have added greatly to Wellington’s reputation for creativity.

Ian Jorgensen, who lectures in event management at Massey University and has run over 600 events in New Zealand, was initially intrigued by the WLG-X concept. “I thought it was going to be a hundred or so people from different industries connecting over a weekend,” he recalls. “I was quite keen to get involved.” It was only at the launch event at a local bar that he became wary. “I heard they were expecting thousands of people and had these crazy-priced tickets. I just thought ‘wait, what?’

“It felt to me like they were pitching it at about the fifth year of an established event – even South by Southwest started expecting about 100 people over 30 years ago.”

Consistently cited as the key inspiration for WLG-X, SXSW launched in Austin, Texas as a small local music showcase in 1987. The organisers, who had been expecting 150 attendees, were shocked when over 700 showed up. SXSW has since evolved to be one of the largest and most important festivals in the world, bringing together interactive, film and music industries and providing agenda-setting keynote speeches from the likes of Elon Musk and Barack Obama.

“I always say that SXSW is one of those things that you can’t really explain until you go,” says van Schooten, who has attended the festival multiple times. “We wanted those serendipitous moments where you are standing in the queue with somebody and you can’t get into an event so you go and get a coffee, the kind where you get exposed to content and people you wouldn’t normally engage with.”

In the initial press release, WLG-X’s headline speakers were Mark Moore, ex-NASA engineer and the director of Uber’s flying car division and Aly Ehlinger, talent buyer for C3 presents who produces music festivals including Lollapalooza. “We’ve got big names from Sundance and Amazon to announce soon,” the 2018 press release teased. “More and more names will be announced closer to start-date. We can’t wait.”

A month after The Spinoff received the first WLG-X press release, it was reported that the festival would be postponed for a year, until 2019. “It’s an ambitious concept and one that is important we get right for WLG-X’s first year,” van Schooten told Stuff at the time. “Shifting the event back to 2019 will allow us to deliver an event that will attract top speakers and commercial partners to deliver an amazing event experience for ticket buyers.”

Over the next six months, van Schooten says that they worked on “considerably” building up WLG-X. An open call for talent to speak or perform had over 70 responses, and she says met with over 50 potential commercial partners – including The Spinoff. “We were really excited on the content side, but the sponsorship just wasn’t there,” says van Schooten, before noting that Wellington’s 2019 Round the Bays doesn’t have a headline sponsor for the first time in 40 years.

“We get pretty close with a number of sponsors, and then the same week that we made the decision to cancel the event it was because we had three of them decide not to sponsor us. At that point it was too hard – as responsible business people if we had continued it could have ended up being a far worse situation.”

Ticket holders were notified on June 4 via Eventbrite that the event was cancelled and they would be fully refunded. Van Schooten wouldn’t comment on how many tickets sold, but said the majority were purchased during their 2 for 1 launch offer. Massey’s Ian Jorgensen says that the lofty ticket price was undermined by their open call for talent. “To me, that clearly states that you don’t know who you want,” he says. “You simply can’t do that for such a highly-priced event.”

Van Schooten rejects the criticism, saying the ticket price was “inexpensive” and “very reasonable” given their target market, and the fact that the festival was planned to span five days. “When compared with a tech event of two days, or a headline music event, the ticket price is very reasonable,” she says. Anyone who performed in the festival or provided an installation was going to receive a free ticket as payment.

Much of the WLG-X social media presence has since been removed, but the official website remains. A large animated graphic depicts a glitchy X through a flickering television screen, exploding into binary-like code before reiterating the nebulous mission statement: a festival of creative collisions. “We really wanted the name to make it clear that it was a New Zealand festival that was based in Wellington with a global focus,” says van Schooten.” As for the X?

“The X is all about creative collisions, the unexpected, the serendipitous.” Van Schooten paused. “Of course now everyone is using X, which pisses me off – they used to all be using I.”

While van Schooten chalks up the lack of commercial interest in WLG-X to changes in the sponsorship environment, people outside of the event have other theories. “It didn’t seem like it knew who it was or what it’s target market was, it was just projecting this ideal of an event,” says Massey’s Jorgenson, who pulled out of organising several events for the festival. “There was no brand, all it was was a dream – and a dream takes years to achieve.”

“Any brand develops over time,” says van Schooten. “The brand essence is set out on the website. It was about the creative collisions between a number of different but related creative genres… I imagine Xero’s brand was unclear to start with too.”

WellingtonNZ said that it was “disappointed” the event was no longer going ahead, but understood the call. “We support the organisers’ decision to cancel the event early enough to minimise the impact on ticket holders and participants,” its statement read. “That was the right thing to do, given the circumstances.”

Robert Appierdo, a video producer who left the WLG-X advisory board after six months due to work commitments, said that there are “several levers” that were pulled either too late, or not at all. “It had the potential to be really cool, but their processes should have been different because everything was happening too late.” His perspective, echoed by several others who spoke anonymously to The Spinoff, was that WLG-X was trying to run before it could walk.

Simon Velvin, who has run the design festival Semi-Permanent for over 15 years, was also disappointed to hear that WLG-X was no longer going ahead. “It’s really sad when these things collapse because it erodes the trust in the industry. There are so many people doing such good stuff but these things live and die on partnerships. The more they collapse, the more nervous sponsors get.” He says WLG-X would have benefitted from starting at a smaller scale.

“That’s the legacy of this,” says Jorgensen. “Someone might be wowed with a big presentation but you really just have to start an event in a community hall with five people and trestle tables. I’m just frustrated because, had this been a successful event, it would have helped everybody here. Instead all that happened is it that took up two years of oxygen with people talking about an event that didn’t happen.”

Of course, the cancellation has taken a significant toll on van Schooten. “It felt like I had lost a baby. It was gut-wrenching – not just for me but for all the people who had been involved.” With her and co-director Avery having invested a “significant” amount of money in the project – “far more than WREDA [WellingtonNZ]” – she admits they perhaps may have been too ambitious. “If you want to be big and bold and brassy then you’ve got to be prepared to take some risks, which we did.”

She remained optimistic about the future of events in Wellington, however. “Look, I’m a new bright shiny thing type of person, so I’m sure there’ll be something else in the pipeline – just not at that scale. Watch this space.”

Meanwhile the first report from liquidators Grant Thornton says WLG-X Ltd owes at least $186,000 to mostly unsecured creditors. Also on the list of creditors are government innovation agency Callaghan Innovation and national museum Te Papa.

In our Q&A series, The Lightbulb, we ask innovators and entrepreneurs to tell us about how they turned their ideas into reality. This week we talk to Guy Howard-Willis, formerly of Torpedo7 and now founder of Manta5, makers of the world’s first hydrofoil e-bike.

First of all, give us your elevator pitch for Manta5.

We’ve made the world’s first hydrofoil e-bike that replicates the cycling experience on water. Cycling on water is something that’s never been done before, and it’s a really extraordinary sensation. It’s not like kayaking, it’s not like windsurfing. There’s quietness with just the water lapping.

If you can swim, if you can ride a bike, then you can ride this.

How did the idea for a water bike come about? What was your lightbulb moment?

I’m a keen cyclist. I’ve cycled all my life and I really enjoy it. But I also really enjoy swimming, so cycling on water was something I always thought about. I always wondered why it hadn’t been done [before], and the more I looked into it, [the more I thought] there must be a way using foil instead of wheels, which was started to be used more in watercraft.

So I started drawing pictures and I thought about it for ages. I’d go to sleep thinking about it. I’d wake up in the morning thinking about it. But it wasn’t until I went to a business conference in Hamilton and the speaker, who was quite a creative chap, said: How often do you get an idea or dream, you think about it long enough, and then someone brings it out and you tell all your family and friends, ‘you know, I thought of that! I thought of that three years ago!’

That really got me thinking about how… you can carry around this dream for ages and [spend the rest of your life thinking], ‘I wonder how that would’ve worked’. That was enough to motivate me. I wanted to find out, and I wanted to find out now.

Once you decided to go forward with your idea, what did you do?

Once I decided to do this, I went looking for someone to help me. I’m an ideas person, an entrepreneur, so I’m less involved in the engineering side of things, and I knew required a very good [bike] designer.

One day I came across a designer [co-founder Roland Alonzo] and I asked if he could help me. I told him I wanted to cycle on water and he said he couldn’t do it. I asked if he could design something and he said: ‘Sure, I can design it. But this isn’t for me.’ I asked him why and he said it was because he couldn’t swim! But he got over it. 

That was back in 2011. What happened in those first few years of development?

The first two years of this was the hardest part. Only my wife, my designer, and his wife knew. We kept it a secret for two years. This was towards the end of my time at Torpedo7, so every now and again, I’d slip out to Tauranga and make small bits of progress.

During that time, we had to prove the bike could foil (ie: glide on top of the surface of the water). We’d go to an open-air swimming pool in Tauranga to test it out. We’d go late at night because we didn’t want anyone seeing us. It was freezing cold.

Once could prove the bike could foil, we tried different propellers to find out which one could propel you the best. Initially, we managed to do 15km/h which great. But when we applied for a government grant from Callaghan, that changed everything because [we were able to get] an engineer who used computer software to help us design the right foil and the right propeller. For example, the propeller used to be at the back of the bike so that it pushed you along the water. But we realised that if we turned the propeller around so it pulled you instead, the bike moved faster. That and the new foil took us from 15km/hr to 22km/hr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRFcmRn_lOM

What’s been the biggest challenge for you so far?

The hardest thing for us was figuring out what happens when you fall off [into the water]. How are you going to get back to shore? There had to be a way that you could get back on the bike easily, start pedalling, get to the surface and carry on.

Figuring that out took us ages, but we did it. Now, with about 15 hard pedal strokes, you can climb out the water and carry on riding. There’s a technique to it, but it’s not that hard.

What’s the appeal of cycling on water?

Cycling on the road is dangerous. If you come off the bike it hurts, and quite often accidents on the road occur [from vehicles] swooping past you, so safety’s a real concern. But when you’re riding on the water and you fall off, you’re just going to get wet instead.

There’s also a big fitness aspect to it as well. If you’re riding a bike on the road, 80% of the time you’re pedalling and 20% of the time you’re freewheeling. But you can’t do that on water. You have to be pedalling all the time.

Initially, the bike was just manual. But once we added an e-bike motor, we opened it up to a much wider range of people. We’ve had people in their sixties ride it and we’ve had a 12-year-old ride it. We’ve had people who are 50kg ride it and people who are 115kg ride it. It might take two or three attempts to get the hang of it, but it doesn’t take long. 

How many bikes have you sold so far?

To date, we’ve had 200 people pay the deposit and more than 33,000 say they want one. Most of these deposits are from the US which we see as our biggest market.

All the design and development is done in New Zealand, but what about assembly and manufacturing?

Initially, we’ll assemble them here to get it right. But eventually, we’ll get it done in Taiwan.

I’d love to make the whole bike here, but in terms of manufacturing the parts, it’s cheaper to get them done overseas. We chose Taiwan because it’s the centre of the world for delivery. New Zealand’s not. We’re a long way from everywhere.

Finally, what can we expect for the rest of 2019?

Our first priority is production as the first bikes get shipped out in the next four months. The second is getting more orders. We’ve got 200 already so our next step is to put a bit more work into marketing in the US and get it up to about 1,500 orders. We’re going to focus on California and Florida as opposed to the whole of America. But once we start, I think we can get up to doing 10,000 bikes a year, which isn’t actually a lot for America.

After that, I think we’d have to look at how we’re going to fund this. We’ve funded this ourselves up until now, and I think it’s getting to the point where it’s going to be a big business. It’s exciting.