Making Boutique Work: Inside The Premiere Of A Winter Garden

It’s a tough economy for live events these days, especially festivals. And while those weathering the storm are usually large in scale with a lineup that appeals to the masses, there are examples of promoters of small events that make it work, too.

Two of them are Nick and Charlotte Colgan, who’ve made their bones building an international live scene in their chosen home Croatia, and are now looking at their first winter project, which quite literally raises the bar from sea level to some 2,000 meters above.

The project is called A Winter Garden, a nod to the original Garden Lounge in Zadar, Croatia, that started it all back in 2004. The first edition, Dec. 8-12, in many ways epitomized what a boutique festival can be: great accommodation in stunning surroundings, with access to ski slopes in the day, and well-curated live music in the afternoon and night – and a very limited number of likeminded individuals to experience it with.

A Winter Garden takes place in Obertauern, Austria, a quirky mountain town that has a Nashville-vibe to it, with all its colorful restaurants, bars, venues and shops lining the main street. It’s a fun place to walk through, lending itself perfectly as a festival town. Slopes are easily accessible from everywhere, usually right from the hotel, so there’s no need to use the car at all during the festival.

A festival ticket includes a hotel room with half board, access to spa and wellness offerings, a ski pass, and, of course, the music. The lineup was largely booked by Ben Colgan, the son of Nick and Charlotte, who’s gradually taking over the family business. It featured a broad range of electronic sounds coming from the likes of Guru Logic Live, Tom Bug, Dave Harvey, Chez de Milo, Ilija Rudman, and others, performing across three stages: the hotel lounge, a rooftop club, and a slope side stage.

Pollstar talked to festival organizer Nick Colgan after attending the premiere, to find out how he felt about the first edition, and talk about the learnings his team will implement next year, as well as some of the economics behind it.

“I think,” he said, “we achieved exactly what we had aimed for: invite friends, family, partners, people we’ve worked with over the years – in a very similar fashion to the way that we did with the very first Garden Festival back in 2006: to gather everybody’s thoughts and feedback, and to see if the location itself worked.”

The premiere of The Garden Festival in Croatia welcomed 400 people, and grew into a 5,000-capacity festival attracting international artists. It eventually moved to a bigger site in Tisno six years in, where it remained until its final tenth edition in 2015. Obertauern is, of course, a different world to Tisno, and A Winter Garden is the Colgans’ first project in the mountains. And yet, there are similarities to how they approached both events.

Just like The Garden Festival, A Winter Garden is realized in close cooperation with locals. Says Colgan, “we want the town to become part of it. It’s their festival as much as ours, rather than someone from the outside plunking something in and then taking everything out. I think that’s really important for longevity.”

The first edition of A Winter Garden in Austria hadn’t been aimed at the wider public, but even as that changes, it won’t grow beyond a capacity of 5,000. It’s the kind of crowd the infrastructure of Obertauern can comfortably support, but there’s another reason, according to Colgan: “As soon as you start going over 5,000 people, regardless of where it is, the event takes on a completely different feel, it loses that intimacy. I think it is important for things to grow organically, I don’t need big names to hit 5,000 people with the first edition, it just wouldn’t be right. I like people to experience it, come back to us with what their negatives and positives were, look at the programming and production, and better it.”

Based on the initial feedback and his own experience, Colgan thinks Obertauern “ticks a lot of the right boxes. The hotel was great, the service they provide was really good. The Tourist Board were also really helpful, and want to continue to work with us. We had various event partners there, the hospitality guys, as well as the guys from Outlook & Dimensions festivals, Anjunadeep, and Love International. All in all, the feedback has been extremely positive. Everybody that went had a great time, which is important. There’s obviously things we’ll do differently moving forward, apart from expanding on programming and production.”

The biggest learning may have been that December’s not the ideal time for the festival. For one, it’s a difficult month to get people to commit, crew, artists and visitors alike. Two, skiing conditions are likely to be even better later in the year. It is likely that the next edition of A Winter Garden will take place in March 2027.

To be able to accommodate more people, and offer a range of different tickets to suit different budgets, A Winter Garden will take on two, potentially three hotels in town. Thanks to a partnership with the hotel chain Valamar, which happens to operate three hotels in Obertauern targeting guests of various spending power, this should work out just well. More hotels could be approached if need be. For the second edition, three should do, though. “If we get 1,000 people next year, I’ll be extremely happy,” says Colgan, adding that there were several venues across town, as well as on top of one of the mountains, that could be incorporated into the festival as well.

The Colgans aim to make any event they’re involved in family-friendly, “so there’s a little bit of everything for everybody,” he explains, “if you want to go for a club night, you can go for a club night, but if you just want to chill, relax, have a drink and something to eat, you can do that as well. On the programming side, I think we learned that running a club night every night, when people have been out on the slopes since nine o’clock in the morning, is not worth it. By midnight, everybody’s absolutely whacked out.”

There was a moment on the second night of A Winter Garden: a young family of four listening to Ilija Rudman’s laid-back set in the hotel lounge, drinks in hand, legs propped up on soft cushions, when their 11-month year old daughter approached the DJ with big, curious eyes. Rudman indicated to her with a smile that it was okay for her to dig through his vinyl selection for a while. Is there a better example of what the term boutique really embodies?

As promoters, the Colgans get all the credit for creating the evironment, where a wholesome scene like this may unfold, but they also take on all the risk. Tourist boards traditionally help with things like infrastructure, ski passes, etc. but not with the core financing of the event. “However,” explains Colgan, “we’re lucky that over the years we’ve built our own in-house production, so all the audio and lighting and everything like that belongs to us anyway. It allows us to run a model that works in a really difficult time for events.”

In Tisno, Croatia, where many events have been added to the annual calendar since the Garden Festival put the place on the map in 2012, the Colgans built “a turnkey festival site for our events,” where all infrastructure and basic production is set up at the start of the season for all events coming in to use, and taken down again at the end of the season. “Without that, without us trying to keep the cost down, it would be extremely difficult for anybody to do anything. That sweet spot is now very, very small, and the risks are high,” Colgan explains.

Whether you’re organizing a boutique event like A Winter Garden, or a massive festival: year one is always an investment. “Generally,” he adds, “it will take us three years before we can turn things around. If we break even next year, I’ll be very happy, but I don’t see it happening.”

It’s important to note that A Winter Garden wasn’t launched to make anybody rich, which is probably the mindset you have to be in when launching anything that could be described as boutique. That’s especially true if you want to keep it affordable for everybody, as the Colgans do. “This will never be a massive money spinner for us,” he said, “We have to look at the bigger picture: this is about building our brand and utilizing it as a showcase for what we do on the production side, but also on the brewery side. Austria is an important territory for us and our partners to break into.” He was referring to the Garden Brewery, launched in 2016, now one of the top craft breweries in Europe with a presence in various retail outlets as well as at Valamar’s hotels and resorts.

Colgan is thinking long-term and across verticals – the only way to make life as a boutique event promoter work: “The idea would be to eventually do two or three events here, one after another, exactly the same way as we do in Tisno, where we bring in the production in the beginning for us and our partner events to use, and take it down again after the season. That’s when it starts to make financial sense.”

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