May 16, 2017

Meet Christopher Festa of TBOX Bar Crawls in Wrigleyville

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Festa.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Christopher. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
When I moved to Chicago after college, I used to throw bar crawls for my co-workers at the consulting firm I worked for. It became a tradition, and starting in 1996, I had my first “12 Bars of Xmas”. After 7 years, and going through several career changes, including the dot-com bubble, and moving to California and back, I decided to start a business making t-shirts and then, charging people to come to my bar crawls. The event grew from 60 people the first year, to over 1,700 in 2002, to then in the 15,000-20,000 range each year for the TBOX 12 Bars of Xmas event each year since 2010. I also throw several other annual crawls including our BeadQuest Mardi Gras event and “Cover Your Bases” Baseball Crawl coming up in May. I’ve always enjoyed going out to bars and pubs, socializing, and exploring as many places as possible, so crawling from bar to bar definitely fit my personality. I always try to put as much creativity and fun stuff to do in each event, and not just focus on drinking. That’s why we have stickers, picture frames, cereal shots, scavenger hunts, opening ceremonies, VIP memberships, and everything to make the crawls feel like a special and personal experience. And I think we’ve had over 100 couples get married from meeting at our events!

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
As the events have grown, we’ve had all kinds of growth challenges… working with the City, Neighborhoods, County, and State, increasing our security, working with sponsors, continually working with the participating bars and clubs to make our events a win-win, and keeping the marketing fresh and the events appealing to every new wave of 21-and-up new people that move to Chicago. And now it’s definitely a different atmosphere in Wrigleyville. Before, we were consolation for the team usually being bad and letting people down… now that the Cubs are World Champions, it’s a whole new ballgame. Lots of new construction in the area, new businesses, and as always, competition from so many other great things to do in this city all the time.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We try to make the pub crawling experience as compelling and dynamic as possible for our customers, an interactive, memorable, bucket-list experience — especially for TBOX, the Twelve Bars of Xmas, the big event the second Saturday of December every year. Our business comes 100% from passion – I personally attend, participate in, and lead every event, “wire to wire” as we say, from beginning to end, and I look forward to everyone. I love having fun at these events, I make myself the face of the business, and it’s really just a business extension of a fun thing I would want to do anyway even if it wasn’t an event! And for every one of our events, we have a cool theme and encourage everyone to really, really commit to it, get dressed in crazy outfits, and make it a day to remember. I’m proud to note that I am the inventor of “The Cereal Shot” (you’ll have to check it out on our website… tbox.org/Cereal…), the inventor of the picture frames everyone has at events, I personally design all the logos and art work and concepts (with the help of graphic artists…. I can’t draw!) — And I started the commercialization of bar crawls in Chicago and across America.

What were you like growing up?
I grew up in a small town in Florida, I went to a small private school, near the beach, had fun and supportive parents, great friends, and although I was shy growing up, I made great friends in high school and enjoyed being part of the “fun crowd”. My parents also took us on long road trips every year, from Florida to California or New York or other places, and I got used to liking traveling and exploring and being curious about all of America, and later on, the world, as I got to travel overseas with my earlier jobs. I think my friends would always say I had crazy ideas, I always ended up being the party and event organizer in whatever group I was in, and always couldn’t wait to go to the next fun place.

Pricing:

Tickets available now for our May 13 TBOX Baseball Crawl event for $9 and Up at www.tbox.org/baseball
Tickets for the big event, TBOX2017, The 21st Annual Twelve Bars of Xmas, December 9, will go on sale this summer at www.tbox.org

Contact Info: