Brown Paper Tickets helped revolutionize the way everyone buys tickets online these days — and now the Seattle company is entering the East Coast market by opening another office in New York City.
Set to open in May, Brown Paper Tickets will offer the same services — a 24/7 call center service and low prices for ticket buyers — that we already enjoy on the West Coast.
Founded by William Scott Jordan in 2000, when he saw a need to streamline the online ticketing process without gouging event producers or ticket buyers, Brown Paper Tickets has grown to about 92 employees worldwide, with offices already in Edinburgh, Scotland, for the EU. The company still puts customer service first — they don’t charge producers to list events, and ticket buyers pay a low fee of 99 cents plus 3.5 percent of the ticket price.
Two other factors that contribute to their success are efforts to keep employees happy — they offer great perks like 100 percent-paid medical benefits for employees, plus six paid weeks of vacation. Philanthropy also plays a large role in their platform, their not-just-for-profit business model gives 5 percent back to local charities of ticket buyers’ choices, and employees are paid by the company to volunteer for one week every year.
Completely bootstrapped with no VC funding, Brown Paper Tickets also happens to be nominated for our Bootstrapper of the Year GeekWire Award.
Here, we talked with CTO and president Jordan and CEO Steve Butcher about their New York expansion plans.
When did you realize you needed an East Coast outlet?
William Jordan: We knew we needed an additional location. Mostly, we wanted another 24/7 call center with more agents and more space for it. We had an ice storm back in 2010 in Seattle that shut the city down for three days. It taught us an important lesson that we need geographic diversity, so if a disaster hits it doesn’t leave you stranded.
We also have a strong presence on the East Coast and were looking to push into that market. New York ended up not being that much more expensive than Seattle. Once we saw that, and the size of the market and labor pool, it made sense to go there.
Brown Paper Tickets has experienced great growth, yes?
Jordan: Nationwide, we’re growing 20 to 25 percent year over year, and more is coming from the East Coast right now. Our presence is growing there, and New York specifically is very strong market for it.
Steve Butcher: New York is outpacing our average growth by 10 to 15 percent, so it is probably 35 to 40 percent for that market. It’s also the center of the whirlpool, with New Jersey, Pennsylvania and areas that host a lot of events close by.
Your New York offices are opening in Long Island City in Queens. What can you tell us about the East Coast Brown Paper Tickets so far?
Jordan: We wanted some place close enough to Manhattan to make it easy for anyone working there to get to us. We didn’t want to be right in the city, but wanted to be more in the boroughs. Long Island City seemed to be the space for us. It’s close to everything and a three-minute train ride into Manhattan.
We’re starting with 10 employees right now, but by the end of year we may have as many as 25. The new call center will also offer more international language services. We’ve had French, English and Spanish now for six or seven years, 24/7 all the time, and we’re just looking to add to that with our additional growth.
Any more international expansion plans?
Butcher: Our Scotland office covers the EU, and the U.S. offices cover Canada, and we can deliver some services to other markets, like South America and Mexico and non-EU Europe and frankly some for Asia.
The New York office will also be great to expand and hire every language you might need. We’re a bootstrapped company, so we have to be really strategic. Frankly, we don’t have the “big 10-year plan.” We just check the days on the calendar and do the next thing, so opportunities change week to week.
You introduced the text-your-friend ticket transfer. Do you have any new tech-related advancements coming soon?
Jordan: Nothing I can talk about quite yet, but we do have things on the horizon that I’m more excited about than anything else we’ve done to this point. We’re looking at things for an early preview late this summer or early this fall.
Brown Paper Tickets has been nominated for our Bootstrapper of the Year GeekWire Award. You can read more about how the company has bootstrapped itself to success in their blog post here.
