Business birthday party – The Digital Picnic turns 3!

The Digital Picnic

Dream Factory rooftop, Footscray

When your business makes it another year, you celebrate! Because business years are like dog years, they go for a REALLY long time! The Digital Picnic are an iconic digital marketing agency, who also reside in our beloved Footscray. They taught us pretty much everything we know about social media and their bright, colourful, honest brand is one we deeply admire. So when they asked us to furnish and style their birthday party on a rooftop in Footscray, of course our answer was YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU GOOD DAY.

The brief

Cherie from The Digital Picnic was like – “you know our brand, so just do something fun!”

So we sat down and thought about the colours they use in their branding (brights!), the iconography (pineapples, flamingos, Frida etc) and decided to go to town! I mean look at how cute and fun their jam is.

The venue

Footscray is a bit of a hidden gem with it’s ace city views. Their party venue – the Dreamfactory – is right on the Maribyrnong River, with views over the massive container yard and onto the city, yew! At night the lights twinkle, and it’s rad. The rooftop itself is massive – with permanent picnic tables, umbrellas and lots of astro turf. So the options for what we could do up here were almost endless!

Part of what we needed to do with the design was about practicality – the venue is way too big for their numbers, so we needed to create smaller spaces and block off parts of it, while still allowing it to feel as roomy and luxurious as it is.

The vibe

Colour and fun was the long and short of it. But a bit sophisticated too – as much as The Digital Picnic are turning three, we didn’t want it to feel like the party of an actual 3yo. The party was about celebrating their business milestone with a decent sized group of their customers and followers – making them feel like they were part of something special, fun, different and exclusive.

And thus the design ended up including our brightest, most fun furniture, a rainbow of dining chairs, heaps of plants, neon spray painted pineapples, coloured festoon lights and a six metre rainbow balloon garland to create a media wall.

Neon pineapples

One of the fun things we decided to do was spray paint real life pineapples in neon colours to decorate the space in a quirky, very not corporate way. It was really fun.

The finished product! Fun times a billion.

How very sweet and fab is this celebration cake by Boutique Cake Art?

The Confetti Room created this epic rainbow balloon garland – featuring some marble balloons to give it an interesting depth and uniqueness.

Ahhh twinkly coloured festoons + city lights. And how good are these guests – Emily is wearing a neon pineapples DRESS for goodness sake!

And here is my as I finished the set-up, right as guests were arriving. This was a super hard set-up – we only had a 2 hour window to get set up and do all the styling touches. And being on a rooftop, that’s a lot of carting things up! It was also 32 degrees, with no shade and the wind was howling, meaning we had to change some parts of the design on the fly because literally, the cane furniture was blowing over and the cushions were being whipped around. I was literally sprinting laps to get all the final items out of the space in time for guest arrival. And when I found this wonderful spray bottle in my kit, the joy I felt was – as you can see – amazing! The conclusion to this is, that we get the job done no matter what!