Easol

The first experience creator I ever met was my dad, Rob Simpson. He is a mountain guide, so I spent most of my childhood outdoors, rock climbing with him around the North East of England. His job was taking people somewhere they’d never been and bringing them home feeling inspired and like they had achieved something special. My experiences rock climbing as a kid have shaped who I am. Bouldering is how I spend a lot of my time outside of Easol. It’s taken me around the world, introduced me to incredible people, including some of my closest friends, and taught me a lot about myself. Most recently I went on a trip to Rocklands in South Africa which has become one of my favourite places on the planet. Looking back, I realised it wasn’t just climbing. Nearly every turning point in my life has started with an experience. Walking the Inca Trail in Peru as a teenager with my Dad opened my eyes to what was out there in the world. Running club nights in my twenties with Rough Hill is where I met Lisa and most of my closest friends and collaborators today. These days, wherever we go, we’re heading to gigs and seeking out new adventures and wellness experiences. Experiences have challenged me, inspired me, introduced me to pivotal people in my life shaped my personal values and the way I see the world. Behind each of those moments are people who put in the work and great deal of care to make it happen. My dad was one of them… and still is! Last year, he actually led some of Easol team on a climb in the Lake District. Seeing him take our team somewhere they’d never been for an experience they could share together and bring them home inspired, just as he did for me growing up, was a real full-circle moment! It’s this deep respect for experience creators that led me to become one myself, and why Lisa Simpson and I started Easol.

It feels like every trend report this year is saying that people are prioritising real-life experiences again… I’d argue that they never stopped. The bigger story for me is what it’s taking for experience creators to keep up with demand. Being together is a basic human need. With screens taking up more of our attention every year it makes complete sense that people want the opposite: to be in the room together, sharing something real. But if you’re one of the teams creating those experiences, you’ll know meeting that need is getting harder. Demand keeps climbing and guests expect more every year, from instant replies to an experience that feels made for them. At the same time, costs keep rising and margins keep getting tighter. The old answer was more people and more tools - but that doesn’t scale. We built Easol to give experience creators control over their whole business, bringing their technology in-house and their website, sales, support and customer data into one place. Next week we’re launching the next generation of Easol, with AI working across the whole platform. It means we can help experience businesses scale and grow revenue in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first launched. The first part of that is Teammates: your AI agents, trained by you, with your data, to advise and act. They work as an extension of your team, using your live data across the whole business. → Support that answers guests at 2am on a Sunday. → Sales that follow up before an enquiry goes cold. → Insight behind every decision, learning what works and doing more of it. The experience stays human. Teammates take care of everything around it, so your people get their time back for the parts only they can do. Our job has always been to help experience creators spend more time on the moments that matter. I’m really proud of what the team has built to do more of exactly that, and I can’t wait to share what’s next.

From day one, Easol was built to empower experience creators with full ownership of your own technology to grow your business. Now we're taking that even further. Meet your new 24/7 Teammates - owned by you, and working for your business, trained by you with your data to advise and act - so your people can focus on creating legendary experiences. Coming this month.

❤️🔥 Calling all festivals, adventure, wellness and entertainment businesses. The experience economy is changing and so is Easol… Today, real-life experiences are more valuable than ever. But high costs, tight margins, big demand and major evolutions in technology are stretching teams. How we sell and run our experiences needs to evolve. Easol - the AI platform for experience businesses, arrives this month. Credits: AfroNation, Swingers Home of Rivalry, Love Trails ®, SurfYogaBeer, Rise Festival Music by @clublyzza

2008 → Dropped out of university to run club nights. 2015 → Grew our experience businesses to 2 million guests a year. 2016 → Hit walls trying to scale. Ran on too many different tools that controlled our data, including one that promoted a rival festival to our own customers! 2018 → Decided there had to be a better way, and started to build it. 2021 → Launched Easol with Lisa Simpson, the platform we always wished we’d had. THIS MONTH → Ready for our biggest milestone yet as we relaunch Easol as the AI platform for experience businesses. At the heart of it all, we’ve always been experience creators ourselves. We built Easol to solve the problems that we came up against in our own businesses. That journey still shapes everything we do, and we can’t wait to share what comes next: a new era where the creators we work with can get back to what they do best. P.S Meet Palo who's been with us through it all since 2018!

AI won't replace real experiences. It only makes them more valuable. The businesses that use AI so that they can invest more into their actual experiences and their customers will win. Here's why: Right now, most experience creators I speak to are stretched. Time is short, costs keep climbing, and margins get tighter every year. On top of that, AI is transforming what their customers expect in a big way. But with this monumental shift in technology, I actually see the biggest opportunity our industry has ever had. The experience businesses who become truly AI native by using it to fundamentally change the way they do business, will have a competitive advantage. They’ll benefit from more resource, revenue and efficiencies than ever before, imagine a world where: → The everyday running of your business looks after itself, so your team can give all their energy to to the hospitality and customer relationships only a human can. → Your business will become something you can analyse in real time, so you're able to drive more revenue with foresight and the insights of your historic data and sales instead of gut feeling and hindsight. → The sales leads that used to slip past while you were busy now get met the moment they land, so growth stops depending on how much you can do yourself. And this is literally just scratching the surface of what’s to come with the new era of AI at Easol. Nobody starts an experience business to spend their whole time firefighting. We can’t wait to give you back the time and revenue to invest in real relationships - to do the one thing no machine can. Make the experience itself better for the people you built them for and spend more time on the things that matter. Easol - the AI platform for experience businesses coming soon.