Festival Theft – How our anti-theft design changed the game.

Name a feeling worse than grabbing at your pockets only to realize your phone is gone while you’re watching your favorite performance. Exactly… there isn’t one. Festival theft is a huge problem, and it’s only getting worse. Here’s how we know….

In speaking with festival management, we were informed that festivals have increased the budget in security spend. The idea is by putting more security staff in the crowd, pickpockets will be afraid to go after your valuables knowing that someone is watching. Guess what? That isn’t working.

An aggregate study done by Cooney and Conway found that 1 in 7 music festival attendees are stolen from at your typical festival. I read this before the 2018 festival season and didn’t fully believe it. That all changed when I went to Firefly Music Festival later that summer with 8 friends. Well, guess what? We left the Woodlands down one phone. My skepticism was disproved.

I’ve gone to two festivals this year, and I didn’t escape either of them without hearing “where’s my phone?!,” from at least two people. We were able to bring four RaveRunner® prototypes, but it wasn’t enough to outfit our entire squad at both events.

It was day one. we had some rookie festival-goers with us and I warned them about the dangers of pickpockets especially at Ultra. Even with my caution, we had two phones stolen from our 12 person squad. Wait for it… on day three, we had another phone stolen….and it was a replacement phone that someone had lost on day one. Detectives actually set-up a hotline to call after they busted one guy who had stolen hundreds of phones and wallets. Could that have been you? Check the article here.

I was ready to make sure that a repeat of Ultra didn’t happen again. We had a smaller squad of six, which left four people with RaveRunner®s. To no avail, we left day two with just five phones. C’MON!!!!!!! As hard as I tried, it just could not work unless someone had a RaveRunner®.

Unfortunately, we cannot change how people are. We will never be able to alter someone’s intentions. We will never be able to audit why people are entering a festival, to steal or to party?

Instead of trying to change the person, we set out to make a product that stopped awful people from ruining your day. We made this product because WE wanted it. It just turned out that we can help a lot of other people with it as well. The RaveRunner® solves all your problems and then some.