Outdoors Geek’s
Festival Chic

Marquardt told Pollstar he and his wife are outdoor enthusiasts who used their personal experience with their combined backgrounds in sales, marketing, graphics and quality control to create a business tailored to make an average outdoors experience a really great one.

“I knew I wanted to do something outdoor-related and it’s really competitive,” Marquardt said. “It probably took between two and three years to put the idea together and get it off the ground.”

A call early on from a customer in Kansas asking Outdoors Geek to handle a camping wedding as well as rental requests for Burning Man, Bonnaroo and other festivals sparked the idea to branch out into doing events.

The idea to offer Glamour Camping in addition to the company’s standard camping rental packages developed from there. In addition to large-sized canvas tents, customers can choose amenities including cots, single or Queen-sized beds and linens, carpets, furniture, heaters, lamps, chairs, and even light housekeeping as part of the Glamour Camping experience.

Customers pick which amenities they’d like and packages are priced accordingly.

Marquardt said Outdoors Geek supplies its Glamour and standard camping packages and gear services to Firefly Music Festival, Interlocken Festival, Riot Fest, Phish and Bong*A*Thon and the arrangement has proved to be a win-win situation.

“What we do for music festivals is help them sell more tickets and bring more people into their event,” he explained. “There are people who aren’t going to go out and buy camping equipment and have never camped in their life. When they see the general camping option, they’ll think, ‘We can do this.’

“But there are people who aren’t going to camp, period, and they see [the option] for Glamour Camping with a canvas tent and a Queen-sized bed. So not only are the festivals going to make money on it, Glamour Camping brings in VIP-type buyers for their tickets. For Glamour Camping we contract with [festival organizers] in advance to provide 100 tents. Then they sell them on their website and they sell out … two months in advance.”

And there’s one more service that Outdoors Geek offers that festival organizers don’t expect.

“What we’re doing that’s really special is we’re actually building the web pages for the festivals,” Marquardt said. “For instance, right now Firefly is actively selling packages in the general camping area so if you go to Fireflyfestival.com and [click on] Lodging, you’ll get a link to Outdoorsgeek.com and a link to Firefly’s packages. “We put together their pages so [organizers] don’t have to do any work at all. We put their branding on the pages and try to cater to the kind of gear the individual festivals want. For example, Bong*A*Thon has a teepee package and Firefly doesn’t.”

The company also provides a camping store onsite with gear and necessities for festival-goers for when “stuff happens.”

Despite Outdoors Geek’s growth, Marquardt sees work ahead.

“I think the No. 1 obstacle is anytime you have a product … there’s education that needs to be done, just helping [potential clients] to understand,” Marquardt said. “We don’t really fit into their category of a vendor and we’re a different type of partner than they’re used to having.