Pillars: Event Series & Community Programme

The context
Pillars launched in May 2025 as a platform for honest conversation within the hospitality industry. The sector has significant challenges, pipeline, culture, retention, sustainability, leadership, but relatively few spaces where those conversations happen openly, between people who are actually in it. The gap wasn't a conference or a trade publication. It was something smaller and more specific: the right people in the right room, talking honestly.

The challenge
To build a community programme from scratch that felt credible immediately, that attracted the operators, founders, creatives and strategists worth bringing together, without the budget, the backing or the brand recognition that most events programmes launch with.

The insight
The quality of the conversation is the brand. If Pillars could consistently create evenings where people had exchanges they couldn't have elsewhere, the community would build itself. The job wasn't to market Pillars aggressively, it was to curate sharply and let the content do the work.

The strategy
Each event was designed around a single, specific question or tension within the industry, not a vague theme, but a real challenge people were navigating. The format varied by audience and intent: dinner-and-conversation for intimacy, panel for breadth, roundtable for debate. Each event was built around a specific speaker or set of perspectives, and the curation of both speakers and guests was as deliberate as the format.

The event series:

Pillars Launch: Hospitality Is Talking
15 May 2025 · The Gate House, Sands End Community Centre
The first Pillars event. Dinner and drinks with a conversation between James from Le Swine and Alix Caiger, exploring the realities of building brands in hospitality, the lessons of the industry and James's own journey bringing Le Swine to life. Intimate, energised and deliberately un-corporate: it set the tone for everything that followed.

Pillars x The Sloane Club: Voices In The Room
15 July 2025 · The Sloane Club
A roundtable led by Mike Kershaw, exploring the future of hospitality through honest perspectives from founders, operators, creatives, strategists and specialists. The conversation covered shifting consumer behaviour, changing definitions of value, technology, sustainability and the responsibility of leadership. The Sloane Club as a venue was a deliberate choice: the setting earned the conversation.

Pillars Panel: Are We Building Or Breaking Hospitality?
26 September 2025 · 34 Bloomsbury
The most ambitious event to date. A morning panel at 34 Bloomsbury led by Alix Caiger, bringing together Harrison Hide, Holly Arnold, Lorraine Copes and Nash Gierak to explore the industry's structural challenges, its PR problem, its sustainability pressures, its team culture, its changing consumer expectations. Proceeds from the event went directly to Hospitality Action. Guests also left with the first-ever Pillars Paper: a 400-copy editorial broadsheet extending the conversation beyond the room and positioning Pillars as a platform with editorial as well as event presence.

Pillars x District: The December Social
8 December 2025 · District Wine Bar
An evening with Chelsea, founder of District Wine Bar, in conversation about what it takes to build a brand with longevity, from early ideas and identity through to the realities of operating something that lasts. A considered way to close the year: reflective rather than celebratory, honest about the difficulty as well as the reward.

Pillars x IWD: Leading Together
9 March 2026 · Amie Wine Studio
To mark International Women's Day, Pillars hosted an intimate panel at Amie Wine Studio exploring inclusion, community and the future of leadership. Led by Alix Caiger, with Sophie Gordon, Clementine Haxby and Sabrina Gidda. The conversation unpacked what leadership looks like when it is values-led, people-first and built for the long term. One of the most attended and most shared events in the series.

What I built and managed
- Full brand identity and communications for Pillars (see: Pillars Brand Creation case study)
- Event concept, format and curation for all five events
- Speaker identification, outreach and briefing
- Guest list strategy and community management
- Venue selection and supplier coordination across all five events
- Event marketing: copy, social content, email campaigns via Klaviyo
- Pillars Paper: commissioned, edited, designed and printed a 400-copy broadsheet for the September event
- Post-event content and community communications
- Charity partnership with Hospitality Action

The outcome
~85% average sell-out rate across six events. A growing community of hospitality professionals, founders, operators, creatives, strategists, who return across the series. The Pillars Paper distributed to 400 industry contacts. A platform that is now recognised within the London hospitality community as a serious, considered voice, not an events brand, but a community one.

What this proves
This case study demonstrates end-to-end community programme management: concept, curation, production, marketing, editorial and brand management simultaneously, from a zero base. It proves the ability to build a community that attracts quality people through the quality of the experience, and to sustain that standard across multiple events over twelve months.