Building a Festival Into a Business
The brand
Roskilde Festival is one of Northern Europe’s largest and most iconic music festivals — a non-profit organisation with a 50+ year history, a fiercely loyal audience and a brand that carries genuine cultural weight. It is also a deeply complex organisation: a sprawling network of directors, departments, managers and thousands of volunteers, all working toward a single annual event.
The situation
When I joined in November 2022, Roskilde Festival had never sold directly to its audience online. Products and services had always been handled through external partners — the festival collected the experience, not the customer data and not the margin.
The brief was to change that. Build a Shopify B2C platform from the ground up, establish a digital commercial structure and give the festival ownership of both its revenue and its customer relationships for the first time.
What I did
Building the Shopify platform
The starting point was zero. No platform, no ecommerce infrastructure, no internal processes for digital sales. Working with an external agency, I led the build of Roskilde Festival’s first owned B2C webshop on Shopify — covering everything from platform architecture and product structure to payment setup, logistics and the operational flows needed to support a business with extreme seasonal peaks.
The product catalogue was everything festival-related that wasn’t a ticket: camping options, early access passes, beer, tent rental, mattresses and pavilions. Each product category had its own commercial and logistical logic — and had to work both in the build-up to the festival and during the event itself.
Commercial planning and inventory management
Running a product portfolio with hard physical limits — a finite number of tents, a finite number of beer tokens — required a disciplined commercial approach. I built detailed inventory calculations to track stock levels and sellthrough rates at all times, and designed cut-off and last-chance mechanics to maximise revenue in the final days before the festival while avoiding overselling.
It was kaufmandsship applied to a festival context: knowing when to push, when to hold and when to create urgency.
Ticket sales and Ticketmaster collaboration
Beyond the webshop, I was hands-on with ticket sales setup each year — configuring the correct information, prices, links and dates, and collaborating with Ticketmaster on how to leverage their platform and marketing reach. A specific focus was supporting Roskilde Festival’s strategy of growing its international audience — using Ticketmaster’s infrastructure to gain visibility among non-Danish festival-goers.
Merchandise collection — from idea to launch
After my first festival, we initiated the development of Roskilde Festival’s own merchandise collection — designed in-house and sold through the webshop. My role was to bridge the gap between the creative and the commercial: working closely with the designer on pricing, product numbers, inventory planning and stock levels, while project managing the collection across Roskilde Festival’s Sales & Marketing department.
I coordinated briefings and bookings across the department for all launch-related activities, managed all product photography with an external supplier — from brief to delivery — and applied the launch methodology I’d developed across my time in fashion and sneakers: how to present a collection, how to sequence the reveal and how to build anticipation before the product is fully visible.
Digital marketing — Meta Ads
Alongside the ecommerce work, I ran Meta Ads campaigns covering the festival’s B2C products — supporting both the webshop and the broader commercial calendar with paid social across the festival cycle.
A complex stakeholder environment
Perhaps the most distinctive challenge at Roskilde Festival was the organisation itself. Coordinating across directors, department heads, managers and volunteers — many of whom had no prior relationship with ecommerce — required a different kind of project management. Clarity, patience and the ability to translate commercial logic into terms that made sense for a non-profit cultural organisation were as important as the technical work.
What the period represented
Roskilde Festival was a project in the truest sense — building something that didn’t exist before and establishing the commercial and digital foundation for an institution that had operated without it for decades.
No single conversion rate improvement or revenue figure captures what the work meant. The measure of success was that by the end of my time there, Roskilde Festival had a functioning direct-to-consumer platform, its first owned merchandise collection, a structured approach to commercial planning and — for the first time — a direct relationship with its own customers.