Rachel Coddington is the Managing Director of Design Week Portland. Additionally, she's an independent producer who has been involved with XOXO, World Domination Summit, the Oregon Beer Awards, and the One Motorcycle Show. When not backstage with a walkie, Rachel runs an independent event producer collective and has a cool family. On April 2nd, we spoke about vendor relationships, how XOXO made her a better producer, and the importance of flexibility. Ben: Hey Rachel, how are you hanging in? You mentioned a child; do you have just the one?
Rachel: I have two kids, a four year old and then a three month old. A real freshie.
Ben: Well, congratulations on the recent arrival! We have a 17 month old. I think we've been feeling...jealous, every time I go on Twitter and read about somebody who's single and just learning to cook or watching Netflix...
Rachel: I know, I know. I'm like, okay, everyone's in bed, and then I immediately fall asleep. So yeah, there's not a lot of free time.
Ben: But it sounds like you’re happy and healthy?
Rachel: We are generally happy and healthy. We have our little quarantine crew. My parents live about three minutes away and then my husband's mother lives really close as well. So we have our, you know, we have people coming in and out, but they're only going back to their own homes. We have a little bit of variety and everyone's healthy. Nobody's symptomatic or stressed out too much. So we're feeling grateful for that, for sure.
Ben: Well that’s cool. What's the overall mood in Portland [Oregon]? Is the city doing mandatory stay-at-home?
Rachel: Yeah. It's supposed to be mandatory. There's no top-down craziness happening with it. If you're out, nobody's stopping you or giving you a hard time about it, but we're supposed to be sheltering in place. All the schools are closed until at least late April, but I think a lot of them have just called it and said they're not reopening. That also means daycares, my daycare is closed. All the restaurants, all the bars completely shut down, which is just crazy. Everybody is still pretty much in shock about it and there's a lot of scrambling. I think everyone's still sort of in that spinning “What the heck?” phase.
Ben: I can't picture downtown Portland where all the food trucks are, you know? The idea of Whole Bowl’s food truck with nobody in line...it’s really sad.
“I've been throwing garbage-juice filled bags into the back of a box truck [for years]”
Rachel: It's so sad. And you know, we rely so heavily on those small vendors with the work that we do. It's devastating. We talk to them and everyone has laid everybody off. Everybody is unemployed. All of the vendors we know have laid off all of their staff and nobody's doing business. It's pretty much a ghost town.
Ben: Well, while the city’s quiet, let’s make use of some time to talk about you. Give me a sense of your early years. I know you're in Portland, but you have a California phone number. So who are you?
Rachel: In high school I was kind of all over the place. I didn't have a real strong path. When I went to college, I really got engaged with jazz music. I started attending a lot of jazz events, but I wouldn't call them concerts. They were jam sessions and, you know, I was kind of a groupie. I figured out at that point in my life that I was really good at facilitation. I was really good at organization and kind of helping things move along more smoothly. When I left college I had a creative writing degree, which is unhelpful for any type of job search, but it's incredibly helpful for just living your life.
Lizzo performs at Portland’s XOXO Festival. Photo provided by Rachel Coddington.
Rachel: I just kinda started trying different things. I worked for Hollywood Video corporate. I was a nanny. I worked at Starbucks. I was a substitute teacher for many years. After that I really couldn't find work back up in Portland, but I met Tsilli Pines of Design Week and I volunteered for her. The very first time I volunteered I produced a thousand-person party with [lots of] different things going on and a bunch of sponsors and a million vendors. Looking back on it now...it was wild that I just thought that I could do it. But I did it and I loved it.
While doing that I started working for Revolution Hall, which is a music venue. I basically created and launched their private events program. The very long story short is that I ended up putting too many private events in that hall. They really wanted it to be a music venue.
Ben: That’s a classic tension with multi-use spaces, where cultural teams are working both with and against other teams selling big money private events. Everyone wants the same dates...
Rachel: I mean, it’s a calendar timeline problem because the weddings book eight months in advance. This hall’s argument was always, ”Well, what if Paul McCartney comes through and we have eight weeks to book him and your wedding is blocking us?”
Ben: Looks like the wedding’s gonna have a really good band!
Rachel: I know. Exactly. So it made total sense to me to move on. There were no hard feelings, just not the right fit. I also got pregnant at that time. Then I helped another venue open called The Evergreen, but they ended up kind of delaying their timelines so I just made a choice to keep moving. I continued volunteering for Design Week but also began taking on new clients like XOXO [festival].
“So, spandex. I have a history with spandex...”
Ben: I want to pause for a second and ask you about weddings. You're working with clients who have heightened emotional expectations and often, this is their introduction to organizing a logistics-heavy event. Are there takeaways or lessons learned from navigating that space that you feel apply to events more generally?
Rachel: Yeah, I do actually. It's understanding that your coworkers are actually the vendors that you work with and understanding that relationships with really excellent vendors will change an experience for any client. Specifically in the wedding world, it’s the caterer. If they're good, they are the ones who actually create floor plans and timelines and all of the things that a typical event production company would do. From the venue side of it, you can rely very heavily on a good catering company to help guide your client, and you can step away a bit. From an event production side of it, it's ultimately the same thing. And you find ways to artfully guide your client into bliss without over-explaining everything to them.
Ben: So you’re starting to strike out on your own. What was step one? How did you go about saying, “This is me in the world. Here's what I do.”
Rachel: I had the benefit of doing all this while I had a full time job at first. I had connections. The Andys from XOXO [Andy Baio and Andy McMillan] were friends of mine. I knew them from being around Portland and they came to me sort of interviewing me for a job, but I didn't know it was happening. But they are these visionary dudes who felt they were not spending enough time with their community at the event due to production needs, so they brought me on as a producer. That was sort of the moment where I realized I could get paid for what I was doing, that I had some type of value in that industry.
Simultaneously, there's a woman named Shauna Noah in Portland who started her own event production business about two years before me. She came to me and said that I could do this...that I could do what she was doing. So I had a couple of key players who had given me confidence that I could make it work.
Ben: Your LinkedIn page says you're a “steamrolling peacock”. Can you flush that out a bit?
Portland’s One Motorcycle Show. Photo provided by Rachel Coddington.
Rachel: I like to be really up front. I know I interrupt and I know that I'm loud and gregarious, and not that I'm sorry about it, but just at least that I'm aware that I am that way. “Hey, this is me”, and I never say no to anything. I just kind of plow ahead. You need me to cut 3,000 pieces of spandex into 5" x 36" pieces? I'll figure it out.
Ben: That's a very specific reference...
Rachel: I'll give you the spandex story in a minute. But ultimately, I'm not afraid to say yes to weird and quirky things. And that's what makes me good at running events. I'll just get to the finish line. So, spandex. I have a history with spandex...
Rachel: I worked for a leotard company and I created rhinestone appliques for the fronts of gymnastics leotards for little girls. So I had had a little bit under my belt of what spandex was all about. Then I helped produce a conference called the World Domination Summit, which is a really cool event, a very particular audience of life coaches and empowerment people...
Ben: I have to say, the name World Domination Summit...it sounds a little Skull and Bones or maybe the back-room party at Davos...
Rachel: It's a funny name for an actually cool, feel good kind of conference. So they love to put money towards these sort of, you know, surprise-and-delight moments for their people. And so I was in charge one year with doing the opening party at Providence Park, where they have soccer games. It's huge. So we've got these field day games like three-legged races and to really truly be a field day, we thought it would be extra cool if there was a way for folks to be on teams. So the plan I devised was that we would cut these pieces of spandex into long strips and people could wear them all different ways. So of course, who's gonna cut all 3,000 pieces? I did that. Sometimes the budget can’t cover your crazy ideas, so you end up increasing your skill set in a really zany way by coming up with solutions for problems you invented.
“I think it's far more important to be flexible than it is to be organized…[you can’t] keep things exactly the way you want them to be.”
Ben: What aspect of all this makes you think “I'm in my zone right now”, the initial planning or the spandex cutting? Like, what brings you the most joy?
Rachel: I think that it changes a little bit with time. I think initially there was, there was joy in just the simple buzz; being onsite and all of these pieces were moving. What you're describing, some type of hands on sort of menial task...you know, it's important. It just has to be done. And it's almost easier for you to do it than try to explain it to someone or hand it off.
Ben: It can be frustrating while you're doing it, but down the road it all feels romantic. Salad days or whatever.
Rachel: Exactly. Part of what makes you a good events producer is that you can sort of code switch between different groups of people. You can talk to a volunteer, the cleaning crew, a sponsor, or a speaker. Different people with different goals. That is ultimately the trick to all of it and you never want to lose sight of what it feels like to be a volunteer. I've been throwing garbage-juice filled bags into the back of a box truck [for years]; I can say I did that recently. It’s part of the job.
Ben: It's funny you mentioned a trash bag filled with liquid. Whenever I'm at a coffee shop or whatever and see someone put a cup filled with ice directly in the trash I squirm. I’ve had bags open on me. It sucks.
Guests taking part in World Domination Summit’s field day activities. Photo provided by Rachel Coddington.
Rachel: The feeling of a garbage bag that opened onto your socks. It's not good.
Ben: Let’s go back for a second to XOXO Festival. I was reading that it positions itself as an experimental festival for “people who live and work online”. It seems they put a lot of focus on the emotional end of creative labor, which seems different to me than “maker” or capital-C “Creative” speaking events. From the perspective of a production manager, does that focus on the emotional impact what you're doing?
Rachel: Yeah, definitely. I always cite XOXO as being the one; the event that taught me how to at least to try and come from a place of cultural humility when I'm producing. This is a group of people who don't typically engage deeply in real life. They kind of live online. They have a corner of the internet where they all sort of live and communicate with each other and they have a community. But they deal with real problems, like online harassment.
It started as a way to simply come together, and as it progressed, it became more and more about social justice, and it sort of happened naturally. These things [e.g. Gamergate] were happening during the time XOXO was being produced, so they brought in more and more relevant speakers to talk about those real and deep concerns. It’s also an incredibly accessible event and I don't use that word lightly. I don't mean that there are just ramps for folks who have different mobility needs. It's so much deeper than that. Every restroom has a sign on it about not being concerned with the gender of the folks who are entering, their Slack is closely run by moderators, they're hyper-aware of the fact that most of the attendees are introverts, and they create spaces for folks with sensory issues...content warnings for a show that might have strobe lights.
This is stuff that over time has been really implemented pretty regularly into events generally, but at the time, you know eight, nine years ago, it really wasn't something that people were considering that much. They really created a new standard of production for me and now I'm constantly bringing those points up and trying to make it become more commonplace to consider beyond physical accessibility...more towards social accessibility.
Ben: Let’s talk about another event where perhaps you’re putting those ideas into action. I want to hear about Design Week, which was just postponed from April until August due to COVID-19. Maybe two questions...First, can you give us a birds-eye view of the whole thing and second, how are you thinking about the rescheduled dates given that right now, even August feels tenuous?
Rachel: Right? So the bird's eye view. The festival was started as a very natural successor to the fact that events were happening in Portland. There was a lot of great energy in the design community, and they thought to bring it all together in one week. With the shared promotional energy and audiences...it was a smash success. A hundred events happened without them even trying very hard. Since then it's only grown, it’s sort of a staple in the design community. Tsilli Pines, our director, has been an absolute pillar of the community for years in Portland. She’s able to really do that curatorial and content support side of things. I got involved with them as a volunteer doing that opening party and ever since have sort of slowly but surely taken on more responsibilities, eventually started getting paid and...
“The last minute fiddling doesn't matter anymore. You can still do it if you want, but [the show’s] going to happen the way it's going to happen now.”
Ben: When did you start getting paid? You were just there long enough than someone accidentally cut you a check?
Rachel: I just started taking money out of the till. No! Ultimately what happened was I think Tsilli and I just became really close. I took on more responsibility and she realized that, you know, I was doing more work than a typical volunteer. She found room in the budget for me and later, got a grant from the Miller Foundation for me to become the first paid employee of Design Portland. Now I’m creating a year-round system of events that supports the community that is self sustaining; systems that will eventually take over that grant. That's the plan.
Ben: Okay so you’re there at Design Portland. Walk me through the process of having to postpone something of this scale.
Rachel: So I mean, the decision was actually sort of made for us in a lot of ways. We could just see the writing on the wall. We made the call fairly early and I think it was a good one. We've put the cancellation news out in a way that felt very non-panicky. It was very much like, “This is the best thing for us to do, but don't worry. We'll move to August and we're here to help you with that transition.” I think it was a soft cancel since we're moving it; people felt a lot better about that. It’s only a few months out. This isn't a full cancel. All this work that we've put in is not just being tossed away. It's cool. We're just moving it forward.
We have great audiences, a good social media following, a good newsletter following. Maybe this is our chance to show how you pivot. How do you continue highlighting your community and supporting your community even if you're not hosting a jam-packed event for a week? We're holding out to see about August. Did we push it out far enough? Did we not push it out far enough? Is it, are people going to be too nervous even if we're allowed to get together? Is this just not gonna feel right? We're just waiting, we're waiting to see.
Ben: Are you considering the possibility of switching to a digital format? And do you have any feelings about that...about what is lost or gained going that route?
Rachel: As all event producers are doing right now, I think we've been trying to do a pretty deep dive around what pivoting to a virtual or digital experience looks like. Half of the events for Design Week are simply open studios. So when we talk about that, I still think that there's an opportunity there. Tours of your space...no one's in there right now. Show us what your space looks like. Walk us through. Give us a narrative of what you do and where you do it and how you do it. But then, we really have to consider what our digital platform looks like. What is our website doing? How does it index things? What guidelines are we giving to our people to capture content? Maybe we can be that sort of bucket of resources for virtual events.
Interior builds and a selfie moment during World Domination Summit. Photo provided by Rachel Coddington.
Ben: For some of the bigger speaking conferences, people go through live speaker training and workshops before they hit the stage. Are you hearing anything about that type of training for virtual events and video presentations? All of a sudden speakers also have to know a bit more about XLR cables, lighting setups, and monitoring? Or maybe out of necessity new DIY aesthetics emerge?
Rachel: What's interesting about Design Week is that there's such a variety of formats. There are packaged talks, of course there are, but there's actually so many other formats that are more difficult to move. Maybe you're doing a handsaw demo, or a workshop about making tote bags, or you're doing some type of, I don't know, skill share that is very difficult to do if you're not in the same room with people. We would have to really break it down. We need to very carefully figure out exactly what production needs each one would have and then what our responsibilities, as a nonprofit, are. Finding what our role and what we can provide and what we can't provide. How can we be helpful without getting in the way of our spaces basically. It's a question I don't have a good answer for. I think we're all gonna have to grapple with that pretty soon.
Ben: I want to ask you about non-events related... well, maybe, maybe they'll end up being about events. You are the author of a children's book. In the book here's a King named Mortimer who has an obsessive compulsive “disorder-er”. I was wondering, did you write that because you or somebody that you're close with has OCD?
Rachel: That's so interesting. No, actually, I’m not diagnosed. The illustration team— Josh and Colby from Jolby Studios in Portland —came up with that weird turn of phrase. This really weird little poem that we decided to make into a whole book. So it's not based on anyone's experience, but we did have it all vetted by someone with a background in psychology.
Ben: At the scale you're working, you need both extreme order, great master spreadsheets and all this stuff, but you also have to be flexible, right? Do you have any stress coping mechanisms or you know, pro tips for how to maintain a steady course when things go off the rails?
Rachel: Right. Well, I would actually flip that around a little bit. I think it's far more important to be flexible than it is to be organized because, especially when things are at the scale that they are, there's just too many damn factors and too many humans involved to keep things exactly the way you want them to be. It's never going to be that way. Two days before registration opens, there's this very weird sense of calm that comes over me and other producers where you just realize that there's nothing else you can do. The last minute fiddling doesn't matter anymore. You can still do it if you want, but it's going to happen the way it's going to happen now. It really does belong to the attendees and the hundred volunteers and the sponsors. Those master spreadsheets that you diligently printed and put into a binder, you're not even going to look at them once you're on site. You're going with the flow at that point. And so I think trusting your past self, who has done a good job organizing, is important but then trying your best to be present in those moments and deal with things from a human side. I think that's the crucial element...to be present.
Ben: That would be an amazing final answer if it were the last thing to talk about but, I do have to ask about your cover band.
Rachel: Oh, my cover band! I'm in a cover band called Trip Wire. It's always been my dream to sing in a cover band with a bunch of old guys who aren't trying to make it. I don't want to record new songs. I don't wanna write songs. I want to sing songs that people love in a bar where maybe my friends don't even care about going. My target audience is like a 50 year old single woman. That's my dream for who would be dancing in front of me.
Ben: So, a lot of Fleetwood Mac?
Rachel: Oh yeah, we do Fleetwood Mac, a little bit of Heart, a little Doobie Brothers. You know, that genre’s perfect. And I achieved my dream so I can die happy now.