‘We Looked At Everything & Came Up With A Better Solution’: Q’s With Dutch Barrier Services’ Stanley Jilesen & Erwin Sprengers

For this year’s Dutch Focus, Pollstar reached out to Stanley Jilesen and Erwin Sprengers, who, along with founder Cees Muurling, manage Dutch Barrier Services, the business that’s been taking the barrier world by storm since its foundation during the pandemic.

Both men have a combined 50-year experience working with barriers, and their latest endeavor started as a hobby, out of boredom, during the COVID lockdowns. The team was simply fooling around with different designs, thinking that maybe they could supply smaller events with it at some point. Little did they know that their new designs would take the global live events industry by storm.

Today, many of the most well-known festivals in Europe are supplied by Dutch Barrier Services, same goes for many of the major stadium and arena tours.

Keeping It Lowlands: Annual Dutch Focus 2025

Pollstar: How’s business?
Stanley Jilesen: Business is really good. We started three years ago, and have basically exploded. It’s all gone so fast. In Holland, I would say we supply 75% of events, and around 60% to 65% in Europe.
We’re supplied half of Glastonbury 2025, and hopefully all of it next year, when it returns. We’re doing Roskilde, Sziget, Lollapalooza Paris, Primavera Sound in Spain, and Tomorrowland in Belgium. We’re doing 30 stadium shows a year, and major rock tours, including Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, Blink 182, Benson Boone, Katy Perry, Billy Eilish, Dua Lipa – it just doesn’t stop.

What are the main reasons for this fast and successful growth?
Stanley Jilesen: Central to our success is that we have a safe system, and the certificates to back it up, and that people trust us. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Erwin has been doing it for 25 years now, and I started in 2003. We know a lot of people, and it’s a people business. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to start all over, so we started from scratch. For some of us, including the factory guys, it all began as a hobby, and now I’m proud that we’re making the best barrier in the world, while employing and expanding our team of professionals.

Erwin Sprengers: For every item we worked with in the past, we’ve now got a better solution. We looked at everything from scratch, ironed out wrinkles, took in feedback from crews and production staff, and asked ourselves, ‘What can we do better?’

What are some of the big changes you’ve made that make your barriers so popular?
Erwin Sprengers: One of the most important logistical parts is that one bolt fits everything. Other companies use several differently sized bolts, all delivered to the event in one box. We know how hard it is when you’re on site, wherever in the world that may be, and you’ve got the wrong bolt.

Stanley Jilesen: The biggest change we made for our crews, however, concerns the transport dolly used to transport the barriers. You’ve got labor laws all over the place dictating that ‘you cannot lift items that are too heavy’, or ‘you cannot lift heavy items too high’. You can’t make the barrier itself any lighter, because it needs to withstand the pressure from the crowd – unless you used some special carbon fibre, which makes no financial sense. So, we made the dolly lower.

Erwin Sprengers: By 20 centimeters. Everybody, who uses our barriers for the first time, remarks something like, ‘wow, this one is lighter!’ No, it isn’t. It’s the same weight, you just didn’t have to lift it as high as you’re used to.

Stanley Jilesen: You may not notice the difference if you’re setting up 20 barriers, but if you’re doing 500 it makes a big difference.

I was surprised to find out that many artists tour with the barriers…
Stanley Jilesen: Some artists want the barriers to be integrated into the design of the stage. It all needs to look good on social media. So it makes sense to take the barriers with you on tour to ensure the setup is always the exact same. There are also money considerations. The more shows you perform per week, the less you pay per barrier, when you carry a touring system, as you pay a week price..

You also sell barriers to venues?
Stanley Jilesen: Absolutely. Buyers include Spectrum Arena Oslo, or Bergen Live in Norway, as well as big arena in the UK we cannot reveal just yet. We sold to a company in Japan as well as a few local Dutch guys.

Erwin Sprengers: That’s changed from how we did business in the past. It used to be that you didn’t want to be competing with your own product. But, these days, it makes you stronger.

Does your product portfolio contain other production elements besides barriers?
Stanley Jilesen: Dutch Barrier Services mainly offers barriers and cable ramps. That’s the main business, but we have a sister company called Rental Department, which stocks everything else a festival, arena or stadium show could need on site.

How many barriers do you have stored in house as we speak?
Stanley Jilesen: About six kilometers. We’re able to meet client demands quickly and innovate fast, because the manufacturer of our systems is located right next to the Dutch Barrier office in Emmeloord.

Erwin Sprengers: We drink coffee with each other and discuss new products. They make drawings, design a prototype, and we can decide if we want to include it in our product line. They also respond really quickly if a client asks us for specific pieces for a custom stage design or particular environment, such as curbs on streets or sight-kills.

Can you reveal what product you’re working on right now?
Erwin Sprengers: The next product in line will most likely be a turnstile with an integrated piece of software that’ll be able to read any ticket. It also helps with crowd management when an event is limited to a certain capacity. People will only be allowed to enter, once somebody else has left through the exit.

The client gets all of the logged information out of the system after the event, and can see peak times, which gates were used the most during different times of the day, and make informed decisions on increasing or decreasing the number gates deployed, and where to place them, etc. That also saves labour and potential human error on ticket checking.

What’s next for Dutch Barrier Services?
Stanley Jilesen: We are based in Holland, but since we work a lot in the UK, we are considering an office there soon. We also have a lot of material in Japan, we got a partner there in Edwin Shirley Staging Japan, who’ve been our partner now for two years, so the expanding scene in Asia is on our radars. We’ve also got partners in the U.S. and Australia and I’m sure we’ll be in the Middle East soon. We’re certainly going to be busy!

Erwin Sprengers: We invest a lot in young people, they got the power to grow, they love our shows, and they work hard. We’ve got a fantastic new generation coming through, because we are old guys already, and we have to transfer our knowledge.

What’s your business philosophy?
Erwin Sprengers: Our honesty is our strength. We say it how it is, it’s typical Dutch. We either do it right or we don’t do it at all, it’s that black and white.

Stanley Jilesen: Absolutely. I would add that the main company ethos is to offer a safe barrier. Enabling our clients to do a safe show is at the core of everything we do.

Subscribe to Pollstar HERE