The Front Porch is Our New Table
The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic brought the events industry to its knees. Melissa Murray, owner of Mosaix Group, a destination management and meeting planning company, wanted nothing more than to take care of her employees during a time when so many businesses were shutting their doors. With conferences and events cancelling left and right, Melissa had the idea to bring the conference directly to attendees. Thus, was born MOXBOXES – a business strategy to take care of her clients and staff by providing impactful, completely custom, and extremely visual gift boxes. Mosaix Group works with all of their clients to create a unique experience that begins with a colorful delivery on a doorstep that’s guaranteed to pack a smile.
The Almighty Table Setting
When planning meetings, we spend time on logistics and impressions. Audio visual, lighting, décor, and the almighty table setting at the lunch, dinner, gala or reception are meticulously thought-out. Time and expense are spent on the linens and centerpieces to create a setting that is visually appealing. The tone for the morning, afternoon, evening, or entire event is set through this type of décor.
We can ruminate on all the things we’ve missed due to COVID, but one thing is for sure; we miss the sense of awe, inspiration, and connection to others that comes from a well-designed meeting or event. At Mosaix Group, we were the orchestrators of this type of engagement and we were truly missing the opportunity to provide inspiration and excitement for others. That needed to change. We needed to get our creative team working to make a difference in this new event world. Our first step was to launch into virtual meetings. No, not the typical web conferences. We are talking about full-fledged event experiences through your computer. We ferociously tackled virtual meetings and produced amazing results that included excellent engagement and visuals. Clients and attendees enjoyed the experiences, but we knew we needed to bring it to the next level.
The Front Porch Impression
Now that we have entered the virtual meeting world, our table settings have been replaced with the front porch. We peer out our porch windows more often these days in anxious anticipation of fun arrivals. It is even more exciting when we forget that we ordered something, and it lands on our porch like a lost or forgotten friend. Our lives are a little simpler with less travel and reduced social gatherings, so we have more time to look at what has landed on our welcome mat.
This revelation tied in with a crumbling events industry brought on the birth of MoxBoxes. We thought – if you can’t come to the event, we’ll simply ship the event to you. We began to provide completely custom and extremely visual gift boxes. As with all that we do, we wanted our gifting experience to be captivating and different. We worked to design colorful boxes with dramatic visuals that put a smile on the face of the recipients the minute they opened their front door. Keep it different. Make it fun. We worked with all our clients to create an experience on the doorstop that started with a well-designed box exterior and continued on with inside branded messaging and custom contents.
How do we ship an all day meeting? We created boxes that started with a coffee mug for the morning, included snacks for the mid-afternoon break, and went into drink mixes, cocktail shakers, and a cocktail glass for the virtual happy hour. We also included branded items such as pens, notebooks, and bluetooth headphones.
Showing a video? We ship movie style boxes and pack the boxes full of popcorn and movie theater candy. We can also include cozy blankets and slippers to make movie watching form home more comfortable.
Award ceremony? We sent boxes with awards that were labeled with a sticker “do not open until {specified date and time}” so that all attendees could open the boxes at the same time. We handled the ceremony on the back-end, and in this situation, even the losers became winners by receiving fun items. Ok – they didn’t get the award, but they did not leave the virtual meeting empty handed!
Virtual meetings with happy hour? We would send ingredients for a mixology class and have a gregarious instructor teach the attendees to make vivacious cocktails at the conclusion of the meeting.
Just want to gather the team for fun? We’ve sent all the ingredients for wonderful cooking classes and have had our chef lead the attendees in making simple but fun and different dishes.
Thinking Outside the Box
With each event we continued to get more and more creative while thinking outside the box for things to go in the box. Yes, we could send fun items in a simple brown box, but we feel the experience truly starts with the porch. It is like that centerpiece on the table. No – it’s not really necessary for the event, but let’s set the tone folks. Our box creativity and unique experiences continue to grow.
What has the MoxBox done for us? It has allowed our team to continue to devise creative and custom solutions for our attendees. We have, once again, felt the euphoria of providing engaging experiences for our clients. Their success is our success. We have always worked in the background to make our clients look good and the MoxBoxes are no exception.
What else have we done? Through engaging virtual meetings and thousands of MoxBoxes, we have kept our employees working. While we haven’t been able to keep everyone in our extremely decimated industry, we continue to employ a good number of amazing staff that have dug in everywhere they can to help our team make it to the other side. We have also been able to buy from small business owners and engage others that have been damaged during this challenging season.
While I will not profess to be beating COVID, I can say with certainty that we are not letting COVID beat us. We would love to create a front porch experience for your team. We have always been about creating the experience and we are more invested in that now than ever before. Let’s turn this COVID shit show on its head and have some fun!
