Broccoli City: Starting a Musical Festival From Scratch

It's Friday, fustifoards the next day and we had not secured.

All the permitted.

Me and Brandon are literally running around. We had to get the fire department to sign off. And it's been at the very last minute. You know, folks on Friday in the government is they've taken off trying to get up out of there, So we were down to the last minute.

Welcome to our Idea Generations All Angles, a podcast about culture's most influential brands and the teams that built up. If you're an entrepreneur, creative, or anyone interested in harnessing the power of collaboration, join me Noah Callahan Beveror each week as we dissect the most dynamic companies in culture. Because the only way to truly understand success is to look at it from all angles. Idea Generations All Angles

My mother is a second grade teacher.

My pops, you know, middle class dude, worked at the bank.

This is Brandon mckahurn, founder and CEO of Broccoli City.

They were also very very active in our church, in our church community.

I think that's where I kind of got.

A lot of my each one teach one type of mentality from was growing up in the church out there in North Carolina.

Down the street from Brendon was his best friend and future business partner, Marcus.

I know Marcus my whole life. We grew up together. My neighborhood is pretty close to his, and we used to ride the bus together.

I used to pick on him, he used to pick on me, but yeah, always been my friend.

I met his mom first second grade, and then shortly thereafter I met him.

This is Marcus Allen, co founder of Broccoli City and one of Brandan's best friends since childhood.

He was a grade behind me. We got connected, you know, probably summer or second grade, summer third grade. At that time, they were still living like a little bit away. I think in fourth or fifth grade they moved close to where our elementary school was. That was really where we got like super cool and it really became a friend group, from sports to hanging out, to picking each other up to just the whole mine.

The two stayed closed throughout high school, but eventually I ended up taking different paths for college, with Marcus going to North Carolina A and T, while Brendan went to North Carolina Central and Durham.

In college, I actually was a part of the theater department there and acted in a couple of plays.

I was like, Yo, I'm gonna do the Hollywood thing.

I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna do something in that world and in that realm. I graduated and moved back to Greensboro, like most of us do. You graduate school and you moved back home. And when I moved back home, I was watching Entourage every Sunday. I watched Asarage and then I had a homegirl who actually lived in La Right, so I'm watching, you know what I mean, Vinnie and Turtle, I'm watching

Right.

Brandon had Hollywood dreams, and after visiting a friend in Los Angeles, he knew he needed to move out west. So he packed up his things and hit the road, driving across the country in search of a new adventure. In Los Angeles.

Man, I was super excited. I've always been the type of cat that's excited for like the first day of school or the first day you know, somewhere new, you know what I mean.

So I was super duper excited.

Taking the Southern Rape to get to California. The timing of Branda's trip could not have been worse, so we didn't know it he would be driving directly into the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

I had went through Atlanta to pick up my older brother so he can ride with me most of the way. I came around like the Katrina Tom It was crazy.

He had got caught in a.

Huge storm, you know what I mean, off the back end of Katrina. I mean, when we pulled over somewhere in Alabama, we didn't have no gas, and then I ended up meeting these like super cool white boys and they were like, follow us to this gas station and they like, man, they pumped the gas for us, like all sorts of shit. And then I turned around and they were gone. I know that sounds crazy, but it's like the dead ass truth, you know.

What I mean. Then I got to California and I ended up visiting my homegirl. I was like, wow, like this is where I need to be. Once I got here, I was like, yo, I need a job. And I ended up.

Going on Melrose and I met somebody who was actually still my.

Friends to this day shout out to my man Seed's.

He worked at this store called Workmen's and Workman's It was on Melrose Avenue, and they were doing things like cossignment with like T shirt.

Brands and things of that nature.

Now, granted, I'm from North Carolina, so I don't know anything about you know, I don't know anything about none of this, you know what I mean, the hundreds, none of that shit, right. I just remember like being engulfed in this world. End up getting a job at the place called Workman's. I met Sees. He was from the East Coast, so we automatically just kind of vibed and he was like, oh, you just moved out here. I'm like, yeah, I just moved out here, man, need a job. Like,

At the time.

Labrinia was discovering the culture of Los Angeles. Marcus moved to Washington, DC to work in local government as a logistics coordinator. Even though the two friends were across the country from one another, they still talked daily, and soon they were both enamored by the buzzing streetwear scene. Local brands like Crooks and Castles and the Hundreds had brand his attention, and both of them wanted in on that energy.

There was a lot of other brands, the Hundreds, Crooks and Castles, but they were much darker in terms of their concepts. Like the look of it was Darkerhnny Cookcakes was very playful, it was colorful, it was it was a bit it was a bit more jovial, and that was kind of the brand that we were, Like Yo, Johnny Cupcakes, Like yeah, like Broccoli City, like we gonna be that.

When starting a brand, one of the hardest parts can be deciding on a name that's worthy of your vision. Luckily, for Brandon and Marcus, they already had that on deck.

I used to rap back in the day and I had said Broccoli City.

In a rat one time.

I don't remember the exact line or nothing, but something that rhyme with witty or something I'm from Broccoli City or something like oh shit, you know what I mean.

That's a vibe.

He was in this little shitty band. It was like a hoodie and a blowfish. It was like the black rapper with the with the band, you know what I mean, Jim class Rod type ship. Right, it was that whole vibe. We were just outside one day and he was like, yeah, because we from the Broxi City, it's just like, oh shit, Broccoli City. That's hard. And then it was like, look different places. We would say it randomly.

I remember actually going and visiting like New York and other places and people would ask me where I was from, and instead of saying Greensboro, I would say like, yeah, I'm from Brockley City and people would.

Be like, oh, snap, you know what I mean, what's that.

I kind of just carried the name with me through college, Like you'll have a friend from DC and you'll be like, oh, they're from PG County or they're from the district, and you know, I would say things with my little friends like yo, oh they're from.

The brock Like, oh, they're from Greensboro.

Brockley City is Greensboro, so like Broccoli is the green and then Borough is the city part, so it's Brockley City Greensboro. So when you met me, instead of it being Brandon, it was like I was building somewhat of a community. So I would introduce myself as like branding from Brockley City.

You know.

I'd be like, yo, brand in Brockley.

City, but up and people would save my number as brand in Broccoli or Broccoli b or whatever the case may be.

I always pushed it. It was always my.

With a name in hand. Brandon looked to his new LA connections to help bring the brand to light.

I ended up meeting this guy named Dee.

He was like this Filipino dude, and he was outside of Workman's and he was like smoking a joint or something and he just.

Looked mad cool. So I'm like, damn, like who is you? What the fuck you do?

Bro?

And he's like, man, you know I got a T shirt line. It's called Crooks and Castles, you know what I mean. We got the T shirts in here and the T shirt was the Fasace mask with the ski mask on the face. I was like, Yo, this is crazy, Like so how'd you do this? And he like, yeah, this is my company, Bro. I got a graphic designer, you know what I mean.

I just I put it together and I'm like, oh.

Shit, I said, make some T shirts like this say Brocoli City on them.

I ended up just like talking to people trying to find like graphic designers.

At this time, it wasn't like the my spaces and the igs and what was my space? But it wasn't like IG's and all that, so you couldn't just find cats the way you can find them now.

I went to a spring print spot. It was in the Valley. I had like the regular Fine with just like Broccoli City on it.

You know what I mean, Like that had have been times New Roman or some shit like that, and I took it to the screen shop to get it printed.

I met this dude there. It was a Hispanic cat. His name was Fine, and he was there with this other.

Dude named KB I mean, who was like a rapper at the time, and they had this brand called Ghetto Rock off.

Of the common song. I was like, man, like, how.

Much would you charge me to do, you know, to do a logo? And he was like, you know, I forgot what he told me, but scrambled up.

I got the money. I paid him, and then he.

Created the first like Broccoli City logo, and then I created like a website, you know, the whole nine.

Because farn was super nice and all that shit.

And at this time, I'm telling Marcus about all this stuff that's going on right like he's still on the East coast.

I'm on the West coast.

As Brendan networked and spread the Broccoli City name in La Marcus was in DC plotting on the future. Soon they were throwing their first Broccoli City parties and stumbled up on the inspiration for their first major event.

We had been starting to have like smaller parties at like this spot called Center Space. We had started giving T shirts away. It was really to promote the T shirt line and to get more visibility, and we ended up giving a bunch of T shirts away. If you go back and look at the pictures and just look at the vibe, I mean, everybody from like Nick Cannon to like, you know, everybody who was popular in LA culture at that time some kind of way ended up

Bro.

Like, I'm telling you, it's some shit with it, yo, we might need to do it. When to do a Black earth Day celebration.

I remember hearing and learning more in depth about earth Day and what Earth Day represented, and I was like, oh shit, like you know, this is super dope, like a day that focuses in on community love, you know, sustainability, this that to the third I'm like, man, like why ain't nobody done that in you know, in the urban community, in the black community, right, And I'm like, yo, I'm.

Gonna do a party during Earth Day, you know what I'm saying?

Like that was like my thing because I'm like, oh, it's Broccoli City, so automatically, a lot.

Of people thought that it was, you know, health driven, you know what I mean, because of the broccoli.

They even thought it was health driven or weed driven, which I always used to think was hilarious, what makes perfect sense. But I always wanted to have some time a community element to whatever I did.

Their passion for community health and the environment led them to planning an Earth Day celebration for the Black community in LA. While searching for brands to work with on the event, they ended up meeting a future partner of broccoly City.

My parents were always very engaged kind of with social movements in the Bay areas.

This is Darryl Perkins, co founder and managing director of Broccol City.

I grew up around a lot of social justice activism. I think that was always I always saw myself doing something to help my community to be socially active. And I ended up going to Howard University, and I started as a business student, but I wasn't really feeling the business courses, but I enjoyed my anthropology classes and looking at how cultures changed, how culture and music played along with social movements back from the slave spirituals all the

Daryl's passion for combining culture, music and activism led him to work with a top leader in the environmental justice space, and was also about to lead him to working with Brandon and Marcus too.

I was working with Carrie Fulton, who's actually a leader in the environmental justice movement, has been and continues to be Carrie Fulman. And we met through Carrie as we're doing outreach to different folks that were.

Doing these Earth Day events. I remember those early.

Conversations but like, oh, they're just doing dope stuff, and they saw it from a perspective similar to the way I saw getting again, folks that look like us, talk like us, making it cool to have these conversations about the environment, because at that time talking about the environment was not a cool thing to do.

I mean it was you know, they.

Saw them as not folks that look like us. You know, we're putting as tree huggers. There's just not us having these conversations. Well, at the same time, we knew how important that these environmental issues had on our communities, and so we understood that. And so the way that we saw that as well as to have the look and feel of something that I would want to be a part of it my friends who want to be a

Broccoli City now had a partner in place to help launch their first major event.

I ended up getting that with them, and we end up calling this event Global Cooling right, because they you know, cooling, global Cooling bomb.

It was downtown LA on Margot Street.

It was healthy food vendors as well as musical acts right, and the acts that we had with everybody such as Dom Kennedy, you and I, Kendrick Lamar, and it was so much camaraderie. On the West coast at that time,

And them over it too dope boys, you know what I.

Mean, because that was like the thing to get like your video on their blog. I ended up meeting him and he ended up posting all of our recap videos. That was kind of like the beginning of okay, let's turn this into something physical outside.

It exceeded expectations for sure, you know what I mean. For sure?

For sure, even though Daryl had worked on these kinds of events before, working with Brandon and Marcus on the Global Cooling, it felt different.

I mean, it's beautiful and you have a space and there's nobody there, and then you have a lot of people there coming together to celebrate Earth. It was powerful, but I think it was also our high moment in terms of we can bring people together in a positive space. It can be fun, it can be cool, it can be educational, it can be impactful.

I think it was like, oh there's something here.

Yeah, I mean there was a magic there. And then after it's done, the war just kept spreading like if you missed out, Like, man, you kind of missed something.

I think we made a little money, but it wouldn't nothing to even talk about.

It was like, oh, okay, we didn't go broke doing it, you know what I mean. Obviously I had to pay the ax, but I didn't have to pay it. What you gotta pay acts nowadays.

You know.

The Global Cooping was a huge success, and the team saw the potential for Broccoli City to grow, but they weren't sure that Los Angeles was the best home for it.

So I'm thinking, Okay, you know what I mean, Let's do this again. This shit about the pot let's do it. But then just the finances became a thing because, like I said, everybody ended up getting signed.

The landscape in Los.

Angeles, you know, it still was a very clicks town, and I'm not really too heavily into like all the clicks and all that stuff.

You know what I mean.

So yeah, we had to like sit down for like a year and a half, like two years. May ain't really do nothing.

Just try to figure it out, like what can we do.

I was in DC. I was working government contracting. I got a job, but I'm active, like I'm in the streets, like I'm going out every night, like I'm partying, like I'm having a fucking ball, and I'm talking to be Because at the time, he's working for James Dubows as a PA.

While I was working as a pdu duction assistant for a guy by the name of James Debos. I worked on like The Keisha Cole Show and some MTV shows, but I was just a PA, and for anybody who knows what a PA is, you're like the lowest of the lowest of the lowest when it comes.

To like production.

So like I was going and getting people subs and you know, making sure what no onions on that joint things like that, but also playing like an office manager too, you know what I mean, to the production places and having to drive and drop off cuts.

He's calling me every day with like printing out map quest just dropping off like reels and dropping off cameras to different people all over LA. And I'm sitting in my office with the door clothes and we're talking for like four hours a day, just like just talking shit. He just in the car. I remember just telling him and just talking to him, like, Yo, this DC shit is just like LA, It's just different. He like, Bro, you tripping. I'm like, fam cats are out every day

He was like, yo, being we need to bring it to DC. Bro Brandon agreed.

That a DC event was a great idea, but if they were gonna throw a party there, he would have to be bigger. So they started putting into motion where would become the first ever Broccolly City Festival.

So on my side, I always have been the one to kind of go off and book the talent. And then Marcus on his side, he was building the relationships in Washington, d C. With a lot of like government agencies and things like that. He was very mixy in terms of building those relationships. Marcus ended up building a relationship with somebody he was like in real estate, and we were able to borrow some money from him to pay the acts.

So my homie Nate shout out to Nate. I had been telling him what we were trying to do. He's like, yeah, I got somebody who probably be interested. We end up meeting at Ted's Montana Grill in Crystal City and I walk in Chuck Taylor's you know what I mean some jeans, hoodie or something, probably smell like weed done and smoking. The car I get in there, they got on suits. They're younger, though they're not like older guys, like they're like, you know, probably six years seven years older than us,

Right.

They start asking questions. I pull out a deck, start pulling out the budget, walking them through everything, and then a week or two later I end up hearing back from them. He was like, Bro, like you made me readjust how I view business because I was very turned off by you by the way you were dressed. But when you started talking, I realized how thorough and how

With some investor money in their pocket to fund the festival. The team went out to book acts, vendors and secure location.

Marcus, like I said, he handled all the operational stuff and then I handle all the talent stuff.

Marcus ended up getting us the Navy.

Yard, which was kind of a crater or whatever, you know what I mean, you know, and it got them big ass bends up and things like that. Like they got him, they have him in different cities. He ended up locking that venue. Our biggest act that we had at the time was Big Crit. I booked Big Krit from I want to say, Johnny Snipes. At the time, Big Crit had just dropped. I don't know if it was Krit was here, I don't know what it was, but it was one of.

Them joints that was nuts. It was like when Krit.

Was that dude not saying that he's still like much respecting you, Krit, I'm still a fan. We had the likes of Phil I Day on there. I want to say, we had a Go Go band on there. Then we also had vendors, right, we had the healthy vendors. That was something that I was always big on, like just having healthy juices and things like that. I'm not the healthiest person in the world, but I always think it's dope to.

At least provide the option, to be honest with you.

I had never went to a festival before Brocoli City, so I never knew what one looked like outside of what we did. But what we did though, was We're gonna create this platform and give other people an opportunity to kind of shout on it.

The first ever Brocco Lea City Festival launched on April twenty first, twenty thirteen, and featured acts like Big Krit, Scissa, and Jamison. They also posted yoga, art, pop ups, craft beer, and games.

We thought we were gonna do like twenty five hundred people. We ended up doing like four thousand people. And the way it looked at the time was like, oh, shit, and the mayor came and shit, it was crazy. The mayor came and at that time we knew, oh, this could really be something like there's a there's a need for.

This safe space, you know what I mean.

For people, it was a lot of women, you know what I mean, And not saying that like, oh we got all the girls, but it was like for those who like wearing Jordan's but also you know, like wearing heels, you know what I mean, Like it's a very balanced crowd. It was everybody out there, white, black, Hispanic, you know what I mean. If you were a fan of just music and good vibes, you were out there and it was super duper dope.

It was super duper dope. And then that was the.

First one that we actually called the Broccoli City Festival.

The Broccoli City Festival had a ride. The perfect blend of rising artists, unique venders, and positive messaging made the festival a massive success. It also made the team hungry for more. As they began planning the twenty fourteen edition. They raised the bar even higher by making two separate festivals, one in DC and the other in Los Angeles. He was an ambitious move and one that would test the limits of the team.

It's like, y'all, let's do it again, and let's just try to make it bigger.

You know.

We had made a little money.

With that one, but yet again we had to pay due back. But we actually stayed in relationship with him because he saw what we were able to do, right, so it was like all right, you know, So then we bawled just a little bigger bag from him the next time around, in twenty fourteen is when we actually moved to Gateway Pavilion, which was an old insane asylum in southeast DC. It was like dead smack in the middle of a hood hood.

We did like five thousand people, five thousand.

And seven thousand people. It was really like, Okay, this is a thing. And then that's when like the city of DC started reaching out to us, you know what I mean, Like conversations started to change a little bit.

The DC leg of the duo Festival was a total success, but the la iteration it was a little shakier.

So we just finished one, right, So we finished and then we're going out to La. It's Friday Fusiboards the next day and we had not secured all the permitting. I remember me and Brandon are literally running around. We had to get fire fighters the fire department to sign off on so we're getting these these permitting. Then at the very last minute, you know, folks on Friday in the governments they taken off trying to get up out

That was crazy. Who's fools for that? When I look at how other brands have been able to grow to multiple cities. It was the right thought for sure, no question, was the right thought. The problem is we didn't have the resources right, Like, we were robbing Peter to pay Paul on one festival, so to do it for two was crazy. We did have the right mindset LA at that time. That's where we were supposed to be growing to, but we got an ass kick. Our venue was huge.

The LA joint was successful from like a people coming out.

Wise part, you know what I mean, Like it was a good look, but the venue and all that felt like we could have got a better venue.

The layout was so crazy that year because the state was on one side and the VFQ was on the full.

Like this big ass kark. I remember that day.

I looked how much I'd walked, and I'd walked over a marathon because we were walking back and forth. I did over twenty seven miles walking back and forth all day long. And I remember after I had never been more tired of out and I'm more tired.

I remember throwing the shoes away, whatever shoes I had on. The bottoms of them were so black and just melted looking that it was just like yo, they're done.

It was a wrap.

It was quite a feat just to do it from coast to coast, but that was our last time at for now that we did that, especially in that short time frame we turned around.

We were very ambitious.

We definitely pulled it off, but it was super ambitious though.

The team had pulled off the duel festival, but it left them exhausted. As they hit the drawing board to plan for the following year. They decided to refocus their efforts on a single event in DC. If Broccoli City was going to be a staple event in the district, then they needed to up the value proposition across the board through bigger bookings, better vendors, and more digital content.

And I started a company called Simple Multimedia with a graffiti friend of mine.

This is Hugo Qbs, marketing and creative director for Broccoli City.

We just started and the whole premise was, you know, like we all were marketers, like keep it simple, right. You look at the best brands, they're always very simple and clean and easy to digest.

So that was our premise.

We're like, hey, you don't need to make your website complicated, you don't need to make your branding complicated. It just needs to be really clean and really efficient.

So fast forward.

We've been doing a lot of work since two thousand and nine. You know, up until like twenty fourteen, I was just you know, connecting with a.

Lot of different people. I co called.

The only person that I knew was a lawyer from my school, and I was like, hey, can you help me set up an LC And he's like, oh, I'm a real estate attorney. I don't really do that. You know, Like I was like, all right, cool, could you put me in contact with someone? So we started an open dialogue to come to find out he was a startup investor, so he was investing in a bunch of startups, like he was investing in like early seed and stuff like that.

They just didn't look like anything.

Else that was out there from like a music offering. I was like, man, like the Broccoli City people got it right. Twenty fifteen, I started event production company, so we got this warehouse in Sterling where we operated, and I'm just more focused on, like really folks working with certain brands like Brockly City and my own brands, and just working with some of these other clients. So that warehouse was really like an incubator for like a lot of stuff.

Would Hugo bring a new perspective to Broccoli City. The team through a successful twenty fifteen campaign and were able to capture robust digital content to further grow the brand, but the team was starting to feel stagnant. Dozens of others festivals were popping up across the country, and many of them were booking bigger acts. If Broccoli City wanted to compete, they needed to lock in an a list headliner for the twenty sixteen festival.

At this point, you know, you start noticing other festivals, you know, what I mean. You start looking at other cats and what they're doing, and like, how can I get some of these huge, huge acts that these cats.

Have, And like I said, you know, you just try to keep up with the Joneses.

And they also your consumers are looking at other festivals too, and they're like, yo, I love Broccoli City, but so and so got you know whatever that you just artist is at that time. But I think that we kept our community pretty good because you know, we just curated.

We curated some pretty good vibes. To be honest with you, I never really had.

Admirations to like build a festival, you know what I mean. It was just more so about the community. I think that it helped because it got to like kind of show off our curation in a sense, just in terms of the type of acts that we were booking, because I could look at a festival and just be like, oh, they just had money.

So twenty sixteen that was when like we had built up enough capital in the agent industry, right the agents knew who we were a bit our name was making bills. There was one agent, Caroline I think at the time she was working for ICM. This was at the start of Futures Rise. At that time, it was like you just got to get the right talent. It was like, yo, it was talent first and then work backwards. I'll never forget.

The Future booking came at a perfect time, fresh off the release of his critically acclaimed DS two. Future was one of the hottest acts on the planet. Locking him in as a headliner established Broccoli City as a premier festival, and it got the attention of Live Nation, a part that would soon be able to help them elevate their booking, marketing, and production.

The same way we were getting everybody else's attention, we was getting their attention. We knew we needed more marketing, but we didn't have a cash I ended up getting connected to this cat, Mark Mangle, who ran the Feel More and ran a bunch of the theaters in the DC market. End up getting connected like, Yo, we got Future, we got Jay, ain't we got this? How can we do something marketing? How can we get y'all support? He's like, man, I love what y'all are doing. See y'all building be

But in order to secure the partnership with Live Nation, they first needed to impress the president of its urban division, Sean g with their twenty seventeen festival. The pressure was on.

We had a twenty seventh teen festival. That lineup was crazy. It's the first time we try to do two stages. We're still in the hood at this fucking mental institution or whatever it is. It rains in classic Broccoli city form, right, It's rain and it's cold, but people was out there still so shan jee there he calls like, y'all, I'm back to the festival. He's like, yo, walk me through. We walking through. He's like, Yo, this shit is late,

What I mean.

As with any festival, rain results in money pouring down the drink. The twenty seventeen festival was a heavy loss financially, but the team did enough to impress Sean g in Live Nation and it set them up for a brighter future.

We sent back down and start talking about how we can pull a deal together and what that would mean, and at that time Sean hadn't like he was pretty much just following our lead, like yo, getting us who we wanted? I think the only name he pushed back on was like Nipsey Hustle because Nipsey wasn't really he didn't have no history. But we were like very tapped into Nipsey because B's in La. We just was watching it.

Twenty eighteen featured headliners Migos Miguel and Cardi B. Broccolely City was now able to get the A list headliners at the top, but the overall curation remained the heart and soul of the festival, so further down the lineup you could still find Grammy Award winners like Nipsey Hustle, Her and Daniel Caesar, local DMVX, and a variety of exciting vendors and artists. Live Nation also provided more than just bookings and production support. They had some very talented employees as well.

So Broccoley City is the most unique organization I've ever worked for. I teld people this all the time because they are very free flowing.

This is Jacqueline Auston, currently the chief of staff at Broccoli City. At the time, she was being mentored through a Live Nation training program called femet Forward.

So I come from a corporate environment.

You know, everything's pretty structured, and you know you have certain ways of doing things, and Brocoley City is almost the opposite of that in a great way.

Right.

Growing up, I always wanted to work in entertainment, but because I went to North Carolina A and T, which is also marcusist alma mater, I studied communications and journalism and also study that for my graduate degree at John Hawkins. My plan was to be in entertainment. Somehow, I did a program called them Forward. It's by Live Nation and it's actually pioneered by Hedelori, and they pair you with a mentor in a field that you're interested in. They paired me with a mentor name of Shavn.

She's the s VP of Live.

Nation's curated program. She became my mentor in twenty twenty one, and I told her that I had a history of doing event planning and communications and tech and all of that stuff, but I wanted to start a transition into festival spaces, and she said, well, do you happen to know the founders of Brox City. I said, I've never met them, but I know the festival, and so she introduced me to Brandon and I took it from there.

Jacqueline started working on projects with Broccoli City and would eventually join the team full time as chief of staff.

I had spoke to Jackie.

Jackie was just looking for some opportunities to work in the live space. She already had a job, she was already good. And I remember the first conversation I had with Jackie. I felt like I knew her my whole life, you know what I mean. And honestly, she was just the sweetest person ever, you know what I mean.

And she's so like on it.

From a project management perspective, from a you know, just an organizational perspective, man, yeah, I honestly don't even know where we would be without Jackie at this point.

Twenty nineteen saw Childish Gambino, Lul Wayne, and Gunner Grace the stage, further cementing Broccoli City is one of the most exciting festivals on the East Coast, but the COVID nineteen pandemic in twenty twenty would prove to be their toughest test yet. With live events shut down, the team had to rethink their entire business model and figure out how to expand the brand beyond just festivals. So they turned to Hugo in his Warehouse Content studio.

That Warehouse really like saved us during the pandemic because we were able to create a bunch of tools on the virtual side that we still use to this day. We were so known for festivals and live events that we had to pivot and have like a different identity, and I think the identity that we did have was like a very relevant cultural voice that I thought was really interesting.

COVID really made us take a step back. We decided to really center ourselves around people who was like smarter than us from like just a brand and just like an overarching standpoint. So we surrounded ourselves over COVID around like some really smart people to really make us critically think about what value proposition we want the brand to

Yeah, I mean, yet again, it was always about education for us, right, it was always about community.

And I had a lot of people.

Hitting my line like Yo, man, how y'all do this festival? I got this idea for this festival, and I always wanted to be willing to help, you know what I mean, just like a regular person, right, Like you just want to help somebody out. So I'll be like, all right, man, just shoot me over a debt or something, you know, just shoot me like a little one sheet. And the Hallmies was like, what's a one sheet? What's a I'm like, oh shit, okay, so you know what I mean, Let's start this with scratch.

So that was the idea of doing the conference.

So we started a conference called the Broccoli Conference Broccoli Conference short.

One of the things that I'm really proud of, the broccolikon digital over two days, we had almost seven million people view that stream.

And then on the flip side, we also knew that a lot of people within our community couldn't necessarily afford festival tickets right and never like Broccoli City was a super expensive festival, but when you think about the people that we cater to, you know, one hundred and fifty dollars, two hundred dollars for you know, a day festival ticket to see a couple of music acts, that's a lot. You know what I mean, if you got two kids, if you got you know what I mean, you got bills.

He looks to the future, the possibilities are endless. They've mastered live events, can create digital content in house, and are launching some incredible initiatives to help their community.

Marcus says the best.

He's like, we just want to be different Coachella does it a certain way, Dreamville does it a certain way.

Everyone does it a certain way. Like we just want to have our own lane.

I'll take our Broccoli City team against any team, you know, just because like we've been doing it together and separately for so long.

Really just thinking about the long play and really just really just making us say, like, man, our brand could be so much more valuable if we position it as something that is a platform for change and not just the annual event.

I mean, that's really it, man, Like it's the brock, you know. And we're gonna keep going. We're gonna keep doing what we do.

Broccoli City story is a testament to the power of community collaboration and constant elevation. Initially a local celebration intended to promote climate change awareness and the black comunity, Broccoli City has evolved into a global brand, and they've done it with integrity and a constant commitment to their founding ethos. As a combination of opportunity, creative ambition, and market forces