How To Plan And Execute Top Brand Events with Harleen Kaur, Bleu Project

Welcome to How To Be A Host podcast, hosted by Charles Ewudo. The show features experts, veterans, movers, and shakers in the nightlife and hospitality worlds here to show you everything you need to know about hosting a party.

Experiential branded events are a crucial driver for fostering relationships and delivering a unique experience that resonates with audiences, long after the disco ball turns off. My next guest, Harleen Kaur founder of Bleu Projects is an expert at taking ideated concepts and turning them into memorable brand moments. Harleen discusses her journey in building her own company, emphasizing the importance of training her team and ensuring quality before rapid expansion. She shares insights from her past experiences working with luxury brands like Nobu Malibu and Ferrari, which helped shape her meticulous approach to hospitality and event planning.

"I wanted to make sure that everybody that we hired on our team lives a life that we're selling.."

She highlights the value of travel and firsthand experiences in inspiring her event concepts, choosing a different influential city each summer to study its hospitality and event scene. Her flexible and client-focused approach has led to successful collaborations, including equity opportunities with a dating app and involvement in major events like a Justin Bieber charity concert.

Harleen reflects on the perks and challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing creative freedom, adaptability in client negotiations, and financial independence—building her company without outside capital. She acknowledges the difficulties of hiring, scaling, and maintaining financial stability but credits reaching an operational “inflection point” for her ability to balance work and personal life. She offers key advice for event professionals, stressing the importance of working with experienced venue owners, proper staffing ratios for food and drink service, and having a reliable security team, especially for high-profile events.

Highlight: Know what you are selling. Especially in the world of luxury, “everybody that we hired on our team lives a life that we’re selling. So the experiences that we’re suggesting are that somebody’s been to the hotel, somebody’s been to the restaurant, they know the menu, that kind of a thing.” Harleen emphazied.

Bleu Projects is a experiential marketing agency and they’re most known for there events, curation of guest list and PR. And a little bit more on the partnership side. Check out more thought-provoking conversations on How to be a Host hub.

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