What I learned from a year of professional party crashing
What I learned from a year of professional party crashing
There’s a whole underground circuit of “event crashers,” and once you infiltrate this network, it’s like Catch Me If You Can meets Fight Club. The first rule: you don’t talk about crashing.
This is a Throwback Thursday article from The Bold Italic about party crashing that we can’t get out of our heads this holiday season. Now that we’re all out mingling again, what parties are you attending — with or without an invitation?
By Jaime Kornick
It all started in 2012, when I was feeling trapped in my daily routine of coffee, work, yoga, dinner, Netflix, waking up and repeating it all the next day. One morning, I received an email that shouldn’t have ended up in my inbox: an invitation from a company hosting its annual holiday party. I didn’t work for the company and never had. I felt honored in a strange way and somewhat nervous but excited, like I was just accidentally invited to a dinner at the White House.
Bored with my current state of affairs, I took it as an unexpected sign from the universe that I should get out and do something a bit out of my comfort zone. Plus, the small print read, “Open Bar,” so I dressed up my yoga pants with a business top, and off I went to the holiday work party…for the office I had never worked at…with people I had never met.
I arrived at the event feeling slightly self-conscious, curious if everyone would look at me strangely and know I wasn’t supposed to be there. As a tall man in a business suit with a fresh beer in his hand approached me, I could feel my heart begin to beat. He asked if I worked there. This question offered an immediate moment of relief, because if he had to ask, then he clearly didn’t know the answer. From there, things escalated fast.
My once-mundane evenings quickly evolved into nights of crashing random company events. That year, I clocked in soirees with more than 70 different companies, including Google, Adobe, Salesforce and Evernote. I documented it all on a blog. From anniversary parties to the release party for a new technology, my social life became sponsored, with free food, drinks and entertainment.
Eventually, my blog got more and more readers, and I began to receive emails from companies inviting me to crash their event — which, yes, contradicts the concept of crashing but makes it a bit easier. Essentially, my life got a little weird and out of control. But one thing it wasn’t was boring.
In that year of crashing, I talked to thousands of people, witnessed the workings of dozens of events and got a pulse on various company cultures from the inside. Here’s some of what I learned:
If you’re walking up to a stranger, the best way to begin is to start the conversation with a specific compliment — just pick anything that you see on them, and tell them you like it (assuming it’s not pointing out that their fly is unzipped). This will make them feel immediately somewhat appreciated and slightly connected to you on account of that common like. Hundreds of handshakes led me to create a book of most creatively designed business cards for branding inspiration — like a hairdresser who handed me a business card shaped like a pair of scissors and an engineer who had his name laser-cut into his card.
San Francisco is always celebrating something. Every event had a purpose that people were toasting to in order to justify why they were hosting said event — bursting with transformation and new ideas, this city is continuously under construction with creativity. While events exist everywhere, San Francisco’s scene is uniquely centered around innovation. Statistically, start-ups have a much higher chance of failing, yet everyone is starting something here. This is the courageous crowd, the crazy risk takers who welcome the weird.
Crashing isn’t always easy, as simple as I’ve made it sound. There’s a whole underground circuit of “event crashers,” and once you infiltrate this network, it’s like a real-life version of Catch Me If You Can meets the Fight Club. The first rule: you don’t talk about crashing.
To cultivate more creative conversations, add in the unexpected. My goal became to cultivate more-interesting conversations and abandon the stereotypical, most common question I often heard: “What do you do?” When I hear that, I immediately fall asleep. If you stick to asking the same questions, then you’ll get the same answers. So I began to ask questions that would elicit unique responses, such as the head of strategy at Macy’s telling me he sings karaoke on the weekends. This, of course, led me to hush the people around us, and he belted out opera as if he had been practicing his whole life for a moment like this, leaving his colleagues in total shock.
Another evening, I brought in a professional saxophone player with me to crash an event and do a pop-up performance. The host at the Marriott Marquis had no idea who booked it, but the attendees loved it, and even asked for an encore.
The opportunities are endless if we’re courageous enough to seize them. Another time I planned on crashing a conference on mobile commerce and received an email from the organizer, who saw my name on the attendee list. The organizer noticed my background in market research and asked if I would be interested in speaking on the panel about omnichannel strategies — corporate jargon that I was somewhat familiar with, so, of course, I said yes. This became the launch event for my obsession with experiential market research.
Maybe company party-crashing isn’t in your future, but there’s something to be said about getting out into the world, doing something weird and meeting new people, as you just never know where it could go.
Jaime Kornick crashed San Francisco parties until 2013, according to her still-active blog. She is now a San Diego-based UX designer.
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