Rich Rodrigues broke into events with no experience, so finding Club Ichi felt like finding a working watercooler in the middle of the desert.
Rodrigues is an executive consultant at ET Global, an exhibit house based in Atlanta. The company’s bread-and-butter are trade show booths and activations, but Rodrigues was looking to expand his domain.
He hopped on Club Ichi’s 10,000-member Slack channel and asked about conference speakers. How do you find the best ones for your event? How do you get in touch? Have you had issues with any of them?
“Within 20 minutes, I had people ranting and raving in all the best ways,” Rodrigues said. “It’s like being plugged into the Matrix. You knew nothing about something, and all of a sudden you know all the pain points from the speaker side and the booker side.”
The group even helped him think outside the box at work.
“I’m not discounting my boss, but your boss kind of sees with company glasses on,” he said. “So to pull from people not affiliated with my job has been so valuable.”
That’s exactly what Liz Lathan had in mind when she and co-founder Nicole Osibodu launched Club Ichi in March 2023.
“I feel like it’s our job to be the ones that can push the boundaries,” said Lathan, a 20-year corporate events veteran who founded the Dell World conference in 2011.
“Working in corporate, you can’t be super creative, you can’t say things in a fun way, but to get inspiration from somewhere and to get something back from your group, sprinkling some creativity in, that’s what I believe our job is.”
Creative it is. Last year, the group hosted one of its “spontaneous think tanks” on inflatable unicorns in the Adriatic Sea. The think tanks offer members a chance to share their personal or professional struggles with experts in their field, who come back with advice rooted in experience.
So what exactly is Club Ichi? Perhaps it’s better to start with what it’s not. Club Ichi is not “a place for panel discussions, a monthly happy hour, servers of soggy ‘rubber chicken’ dinners, or stodgy, stuffy, and stale,” according to its website.
It’s a community for B2B event marketers. Put more simply, “it feels like a bunch of friends hanging out and sharing thoughts,” according to Rodrigues.
It all started when Lathan and Osibodu decided to leave their experiential marketing agency, Haute Companies (now Brand Revolution), in 2022. The duo was known for their inventive team-building exercises, like secret trips where guests were instructed to arrive at JFK with their passports, only to find out they’d be getting on a chartered flight to Tuscany for a truffle-hunting, pasta-making extravaganza.
After their departure, “people kept asking us, ‘Where did the community go?’”
They tried their hand at an official group the following spring, starting with a supper club in Austin. By December 2023, their Slack group had grown to 600 members.
That number has since risen to more than 10,000 free members and 350 premium ones, along with strategic partnerships with brands that help members with everything from hotel accommodations to event registration.
“Things people actually need,” Lathan said.
Sarah Alvarez, an events marketing manager at apree health in Minneapolis, has put her membership to good use.
“I’m adopting a new lead scanning tool that I learned about through one of the members of the group,” she said. “I’m talking to another member about a field event opportunity.”
She found out about the group through LinkedIn, but she finally took the plunge last summer, after a colleague told her she’d just joined.
“Club Ichi has a very inclusive vibe. They want everyone to hang out with them, and you want to, too,” she said.
To Lathan, the big-name associations didn’t seem to have a vibrant community who was eager to help. Alvarez, for her part, found that they often focused too much on the planning side.
“When you join as a new member, Liz makes it part of her role to reach out to you individually to see where you came from and what your goals are,” Alvarez said. “I told her right away that I was in this niche role, and she made an effort to build programming [about it] and to include me in thought leadership sessions.”
Lathan invited Alvarez to share her experiences in a filmed interview, which will be released later this month to Club Ichi members.
“In this world we kind of feel put to the side, it was really flattering, and it makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger,” she said.
