“We Have a Blast Throwing Parties for Big-Name Brands and Politicians”

TINSEL EXPERIENTIAL DESIGN

LIZ CASTELLI, ADETTE C. CONTRERAS, AND ERICA TAYLOR HASKINS became friends singing in an a capella group at the George Washington University. Now they harmonize their roles at their New York City–based events company. “At first we were all doing the same things,” Adette (center) says. “But we’ve figured out where our individual strengths lie, and now we occupy distinct spaces.” Adette, as chief executive officer, concentrates on strategy and the creative side of the business. Liz (left), the chief operations officer, heads up day-to-day projects and execution. And Erica (right), chief growth officer, spearheads sales and fosters client relationships.

To call Tinsel an events company is something of an understatement, though it did start out that way. A few months after throwing her own wedding, Liz was still thinking about party planning. So as she sat around her kitchen table with Adette and Erica, she strategized with them about how to turn that hobby into a business. Before long, the three friends were planning weddings and the occasional birthday and anniversary party.

Like Erica, Adette had worked in advertising and marketing. “We were looking at our business model, and it didn’t add up,” Adette says. “Marketing 101 tells you it’s all about repeat clients and using recurring revenue in order to grow. But, hopefully, people only get married once, so if we wanted to grow, we needed to evolve.”

They pivoted to consumer marketing, orchestrating product launches and influencer events for brands. “Now our bread and butter is huge conferences and big campaigns, both national and international. Our clients are companies like Spotify and Google,” Adette says.

They also, as Erica puts it, “use our event superpowers for good.” For the 2020 elections and 2021 Georgia runoffs, she says, “we helped strategize, produce, design, and execute this multicity mobile tour called Pizza to the Polls. We were essentially feeding, hydrating, and caffeinating people waiting in line in 21 cities. We arranged the food trucks, the staffing, and the Covid protocols.” In June, they completed a longawaited follow-up project: a celebstudded, blowout party for all the campaign workers and volunteers who’d missed out on inaugural parties because of the pandemic.

OUR BEST ADVICE “Normalizing conflict in a partnership is so important,” Liz says. “We’re taught as women to not say anything and just smile and nod, but those tools don’t serve you in business. Owning this company has let me learn, in a safe environment with friends, how to handle conflict and come back to each other at the end of the day.”

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