How Hosting a Paint and Sip at Your Venue Works

You have heard a version of this pitch before. Somebody wants your room on a quiet night. They promise a crowd, they use the word partnership, and then somewhere in the third paragraph there is a fee, a minimum spend, a revenue split, or a line about you covering the promotion. By the time the real number surfaces you have already given up twenty minutes you did not have.

So when you read that hosting a Paint Juicy night at your venue costs you nothing, the sensible reaction is to go looking for where the cost is hiding. Good. Look for it. It is a short search, because the answer sits in one sentence.

Paint Juicy is paid by the guests, not by the venue. Every person in that room bought a ticket before they walked through your door. The venue is not the customer. The guests are.

A public session ticket is $59 AUD a head. For that, we bring the host artist, every art material and the sound gear, handle the advertising, run the ticketing and look after the customer service. It is a complete night out on its own, and it is funded entirely by the people painting. Because the guests already pay for the night, there is nothing left for the venue to be charged for. No venue fee. No commission. No hire charge. Not a discounted one, not a trial one, not one that appears at session three.

What the venue gets is the bar. Forty to eighty people arrive in the early evening, stay for up to 3 hours, and buy their drinks from you across the whole of it. Those takings are yours in full. That is the venue's return, it is the only return either side has designed for, and it is the reason the arrangement holds up without money changing hands between us.

The three things managers assume are the catch

"You will want a minimum spend guarantee." No. You are not asked to guarantee a bar spend, a headcount, or a dollar figure of any kind. There is nothing to sign that puts you on the hook if a night is quieter than either of us hoped.

"You will take a cut of the bar." No. Bar takings are not split, not reported to us, and not part of the arrangement. We do not ask what you took. It is your bar, your tills, your money.

"You will bill for the extras." No. There is no setup charge, no equipment hire, no cleaning fee and no travel fee anywhere in our Queensland, New South Wales and Northern Territory service regions. Paint Juicy is 100% mobile, there is no studio anywhere, so travelling to a venue is not an extra service. It is the only way we operate.

From the outside this can feel like a lot of moving parts landing in your venue on a night you are responsible for. It is worth walking through the shape of it, start to finish, so you know what you are agreeing to before you agree to it.

1. The first conversation

It is a phone call, and it is short. We ask what your quiet night is, roughly how many people you can seat at tables, and whether the bar is yours. You ask us whatever you like. Nobody arrives with a folder, and there is no second meeting to schedule before anything can happen. Most venues know inside ten minutes whether this is worth a date.

2. Picking the date and the theme

You nominate a night that suits your trade, and we work to it rather than the other way around. Then we choose a theme together. Our nights are built around music and nostalgia, so the options run from 80s and 90s to ABBA, Aussie rock, movie magic and a bottomless brunch session for the 18+ crowd. Some themes suit some rooms better than others, and we will say so.

3. Selling the tickets

This part is entirely ours. We build the event, put the tickets on sale, promote it, and answer every question that comes in from a guest. You are welcome to share it with your own audience, and plenty of venues do, but nothing is asked of you and nothing depends on it. If a guest rings your venue confused about the booking, the answer is always the same, send them to us.

4. The night itself

We arrive well ahead of the guests and set the room up ourselves. Guests turn up in the early evening, in groups, in a good mood, and they head to the bar before they sit down. The session runs for up to 3 hours. There is painting, there is a lot of singing, and it is louder and funnier than people expect. Between layers, while the paint dries, guests naturally drift back to the bar. Nobody has to be told to. By the end everyone has a finished canvas they are unreasonably proud of, and a phone full of photographs of your room.

5. The room afterwards

The session finishes and the room is cleared and back to normal shortly after. Everything we brought in leaves with us, tables go back where they came from, and there is no paint anywhere it should not be. The promise is simple and we have never needed a longer version of it: the room goes back exactly as we found it. Nothing waits for your morning staff.

It would be easy to write that this works anywhere. It does not, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon and ours. Here is the honest version.

If you are reading this on behalf of a particular kind of venue, the argument looks a little different depending on the room. There are pages written for pubs and hotels looking at a flat midweek bar, for RSL clubs with a function room that sits unbooked, for breweries with a taproom that empties out early, and for community clubs with a hall that sits dark midweek. If none of those is you, the full list of venue partnership pages will point you at the right one.