Culture is future » Innovation and digital

06.23.2016

CULTURAL START-UP OF THE WEEK: The Place To Buy

Next-up on our online cultural entrepreneur series, the Forum d’Avignon presents: The Place to Buy, a last-minute ticketing solution for cultural, sportive and leisure events, based on an auction system.   

What is your project/idea/start-up?

The Place To Buy helps event producers to optimize their sales by acting during the final ticket sales phase. We allow viewers to access their favourite events at the last moment and producers to improve their load factors, revenues and fight against the black market.

The Place To Buy ticketing solution requires no investment and is complementary to existing ticketing solutions, it’s a new sales channel based on a classic or decreasing auction system depending on the needs of each event. In fact, we work in two situations:

  • On sold-out events with a classic auction;
  • On non-full events at D-7 with decreasing auction preserving the image of the event, which does not classify it among strongly reduced-price events.

What is your current challenge?

The challenge we face now is to convince every actor of the distribution line of the benefits of our auction system. Whether in terms of higher revenues and/or increased attendance, producers are always winning.

For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur?

It takes a lot of curiosity and openness to be a cultural entrepreneur. The Place to Buy team is personally found of culture, but professionally speaking, we had to understand a world we didn’t know at all, so we learned many new things. Culture is also another way of thinking in the business world, relationships are not the same as in other sectors, and neither are the goals. And finally it is primarily a desire to create something to facilitate access to culture and make it fun!

Photo Credit © The Place To Buy

Follow The Place To Buy on… Website, twitter, Facebook,

The web series : we’re interviewing cultural start-ups – Contact us!

As part of its web series on cultural entrepreneurship, the Forum d’Avignon is proud to present each week exciting stories on cultural start-ups.

This project is part of the Forum d’Avignon’s on-going work, in line with its 2015 agenda, on the ‘hybridization of economic models in cultural and on the manifesto on cultural entrepreneurship in creative industries (to be published soon).

To participate and promote your cultural start-up on the Forum d’Avignon’s website: please send to the address forum-avignon.org@orange.fr:

  • A photo (website/founders/logo) in HD
  • A video link presenting your project
  • A short answer (2-3 lines, in English and French) to the following three questions:

                        - What is your project/idea/start-up?

                        - What is your current challenge?

                        - For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur