Host a Paint and Sip Night at Your Bowls Club

The greens are full. The clubhouse is not.

The greens are the thing people photograph, and they are also the thing that costs the most to keep in condition. But a green has never taken a dollar over a counter. The clubhouse does that. And for most clubs the clubhouse only really hums when there is bowls on, which means the bar takings rise and fall with a fixtures calendar that was set months ago by somebody else.

Then there is the membership list. The names on it have been there a long time, plenty of them for decades, and they are not being replaced at the rate they are coming off. Every club committee in the country has sat through some version of that conversation, usually after the AGM, usually without a good answer.

What makes it frustrating is that the club itself is not the problem. The building is comfortable, the bar is licensed and properly staffed, the parking is free, and there is more usable floor space in there than most venues in town would know what to do with. The people who would happily spend a whole evening and a decent bar tab inside it have simply never been given a reason to open the door.

Paint Juicy exists to hand them one.

What partnering with us actually involves

Paint Juicy is a 100% mobile paint and sip company working across Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory. There is no studio. Every event we run happens in a room that belongs to somebody else, and yours could be one of them.

The arrangement fits in a sentence. There is no venue fee, no commission and no hire charge, so the club pays nothing. Paint Juicy is paid by the guests through ticket sales, and that is precisely why there is nothing for you to pay. You supply the room and the bar. We supply everything else, and the guests buy their drinks from you.

A session needs roughly 60cm of table per painter and usually runs with 40 to 80 guests. People arrive early in the evening, the event runs about three hours, and the room is cleared and back to normal shortly after the finish. Your staff work the bar exactly as they would on any other night.

There are no travel fees anywhere inside our service regions, so a club at Longreach is treated the same as a club at Labrador.

Reaching the people who have never considered your club

Bowls clubs already proved this can be done, and you proved it yourselves.

Barefoot bowls did not create a single new pennant player, and it was never trying to. What it did was give people with no interest whatsoever in bowls a reason to be standing on a bowls club lawn with a drink in their hand on an afternoon they would otherwise have spent somewhere else entirely. It worked because it was never really about bowls. It was about being outdoors with your mates on a beautiful piece of grass, and the club happened to own the beautiful piece of grass.

A paint and sip night is the same trick with a different hook. It does not need the greens and it does not need daylight, so it does not compete with the part of the club that is already working. It uses the room you have got, on an evening that room is sitting empty, and it gives a completely different set of people a reason to type your club's name into their phone for the first time in their lives.

That reason has to be strong enough to move somebody off their couch, and this is the part we take off your hands entirely. Paint Juicy sells the tickets. Paint Juicy runs the advertising and the marketing. Paint Juicy answers every customer question, every booking change and every phone call about parking. Your office does not field any of it. More than 42,000 guests have come through a Paint Juicy event, we hold 4.9 stars on Google, and we have been recognised as a Best of Queensland Experience every year since 2022. That reputation is what does the persuading, and it arrives at your door already built.

Here is what that means on the night. Forty to eighty people walk into a building most of them have only ever driven past. They find out that the parking is easy, that the bar prices are reasonable, that the staff are friendly and that the room is a great deal nicer inside than they had assumed from the street. The mystery goes out of the place. For a club whose biggest quiet obstacle is that half the suburb has no idea what is behind the front doors, that is worth a great deal more than one night of bar trade.

And this is not a one off stunt. Clubs that work with us regularly get a recurring evening in the calendar that fills with people who were never on the membership list, never on a mailing list, and were never going to arrive on their own.

Who brings what

Who turns up, and why they suit a bowls club

Our guests are women aged from 30 through to 90, with the biggest group sitting between 35 and 65. They arrive in fours and sixes and eights, birthday groups, work teams, neighbours, sisters, mothers with grown up daughters. They book weeks ahead, they turn up on time, and they treat a night out as an occasion.

That crowd suits a bowls club better than it suits almost anywhere else in town, and for very practical reasons. They want somewhere they can park without circling the block. They want a room where they can hear each other talk. They want a bar with a queue that moves. They want to sit down at a proper table rather than balance a drink on a windowsill. A bowls club has all four of those things by design, and they are the exact four things a city venue struggles to offer.

Between layers of paint people naturally drift back to the bar, because that is what happens when the canvas needs a minute and the singalong is going. Nobody has to prompt it. Whatever they spend across those three hours is yours, in full, and it is the entire point of the arrangement.

Most of our events are 18+, which keeps the night straightforward for your duty manager and your RSA obligations.

"Our members will not like their club being taken over"

This is the objection we hear most from bowls clubs, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.

It is not a takeover. It is one evening, in one part of your building, on a date your committee chooses. Members who want to sit at the bar and watch the cricket can sit at the bar and watch the cricket. The greens are untouched, the shed is untouched, the honour boards stay on the wall. We bring our own gear in, we set up around whatever your room is already doing, and when it is over the room goes back exactly as we found it. Not close to it. Exactly.

Now the honest part. It will be louder than a normal Tuesday. There is music, there is a host on a microphone, and there is a fairly enthusiastic singalong somewhere in the middle of it. If a particular night matters to your regulars, do not put us on that night. Put us on the night the room is dark and nobody is missing anything.

What we have found, more often than not, is that the members who were most sceptical beforehand end up staying back to watch. Somebody's wife books in. Then somebody's daughter books the next one. A club that has been quietly worrying about who is coming through the door in ten years time tends to warm to a room full of new faces fairly quickly.

If the committee wants to see it before committing to anything, run one and judge it on the night. That is a fair way to settle it.

Bowls club questions, answered

Before you decide

If you would like the whole arrangement laid out step by step, from the first conversation through to the morning after the event, read how hosting a paint and sip night at your venue works. To see the kind of evening your clubhouse would be hosting, have a look through the upcoming Queensland event calendar.

If your club sits somewhere between a bowls club and a general community venue, the same offer applies to community clubs and to RSL clubs, or you can start from the full list of venue types we partner with.