The Elusive Wow Factor

At every memorable event, there’s a “wow” factor, an element that stops guests in their tracks.

At Matsuhisa Vail, Audi’s corporate headquarters during the 2015 Audi FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, the pièce de résistance was a 30-foot-by-20-foot three-dimensional photo of Bode Miller we mounted to a custom temporary wall. Fifty parallelograms were pieced together to create a textured, three-dimensional map of the famed skier, presenting the larger-than-life athlete in a larger-than-life manner. It was the backdrop to many a photo proudly displayed on social media during those exciting 13 days.

So, how do you take a sushi restaurant in the heart of Vail and turn it into an Audi HQ for an international ski event? Through coordinated design, custom fabrication and skillful installation thus giving the space an entirely new identity.

That’s brand identity, and it’s a wow factor on a grand scale. It’s the type of thing we at Pink Monkey Solutions love, likely because the company was born more than a decade ago out of a passion for theater. Co-owners Nathan Cox and Mike Baugh studied acting together before moving to New York City to pursue careers on the stage, so for them, fabrication is synonymous with scenic design. Custom fabrication projects present the sort of logistical challenges our team loves to solve, from how brides can walk on water — have you seen the pool runway we created for the Four Seasons Vail? — to building things that were only imagined yesterday. Last October we created a 20-foot diameter chandelier out of a thousand beer bottles on a spiraling truss. It served as the centerpiece of the VIP tent at an Oktoberfest celebration in Denver.

At a Doctor Who-themed bar mitzvah held in Eagle County, Pink Monkey Solutions fabricated a life-sized TARDIS, the fictional time machine featured in the British science fiction television program. Using photos of the TARDIS from the TV production set, we produced a centerpiece that was accurate enough to impress the most devout fan. It’s these types of projects that allow us the opportunity to not just make a space beautiful, but to transform it. Take for instance a Mid-Summer’s Night Dream-themed 40th birthday celebration that took place in Edwards this past fall. Using a system of trusses, our team created a forest setting including a 22-foot-high film set quality oak tree sourced from a prop house in California. Vines and lights hung from the 30-foot-diameter canopy of branches, completely transforming an in-home rec center into a whimsical, fairytale forest. Guests intimately familiar with the space didn’t even recognize it after we completed the installation.

If you’re planning an event, be it a wedding, social or corporate event, we encourage you to sit down and brainstorm a meaningful component that will get folks talking (and posting!).  If you need help with either the idea or the execution phase, don’t be afraid to reach out for help. We believe so much in the wow factor, and the emotion it inevitably evokes in event attendees, that we’ve taken a long standing internal fabrication capability at Pink Monkey Solutions and created a separate company. DB Fabricor will focus entirely on the custom fabrication of wow factors not just for Pink Monkey, but for our industry brethren and other discerning individuals. We’d love to discuss how we can help you personalize a custom event that will stop people in their tracks and have them neglecting the hors d’oeuvres and reaching for their cameras.