I Launched a Social Club and Sold Out Every Event

Some of my best design work has nothing to do with screens. And yes, we sold out every single event.

Back in January 2025, I started Butter Garden, a self-reflection social club in Vancouver, with one of my closest friends, Linda. After coming back from a month-long visit to Toronto, I found myself reminiscing about how easy it was to connect with people there. People were open, supportive, and enthusiastic about building a social scene. A train ride beside a stranger could be some of the most life-changing conversation you'll ever experience. Coming back to Vancouver, I couldn't shake the disappointment: why does this city feel so introverted and surface-level when it comes to creative spaces? Linda and I knew we had to change that. We saw an opportunity to connect people from all walks of life — artists, teachers, photographers, writers, and beyond — and build something more meaningful.

We chose the name Butter Garden, a visceral title that symbolizes nourishment and growth. From the start, we were intentional about scale keeping events between 20 and 30 guests; small enough for real conversations, big enough to meet someone unexpected. I took the lead on planning and logistics, and our first event was sending letters to yourself in 6 months — intimate, intentional, and designed around a specific feeling we wanted people to leave with. I created an itinerary, budget, and gathered everything we needed. We aimed for a crowd of 20, but when material costs rose, the nerves set in. What if we didn't break even?

The first week of ticket sales was rough. Barely 10% sold, and the nerves were hard to shake. I realized the slow sales were likely a lack of urgency, so I leaned into scarcity and switched our profit model to a sliding scale, giving people the option to donate extra if they wanted to support us. Tickets picked up, we sold out completely, and people started messaging us for extras. That pattern continued and over six months, we ran four events and sold out every single one, eventually pushing our guest limit to 30 just to meet demand.

What Butter Garden taught me is that experience design doesn't begin and end with a screen. Every detail — the name, the format, the guest count, the pricing model, the feeling people walked away with — was a design decision. The same instinct that drives my professional work drove this: nothing about a great experience is accidental, and I'll keep pulling on every thread until it feels truly considered.