Here’s a surprising fact about Matthew Swinnerton, founder of Event Santa Cruz, which will be organizing this year’s annual West End Celebration in Sand City: He’s never been to the West End Celebration.
Yet over a coffee on a recent morning at Sweet Elena’s in Sand City, Swinnerton shows no concern over that fact – putting on events like West End is in his DNA and is why, a dozen years ago, the Santa Cruz resident transitioned out of a career in sales to becoming an event producer. But he doesn’t have time to attend many events he’s not producing. What also makes West End outside of the norm for Swinnerton is that it’s not his event, his idea – he doesn’t usually have clients.
Swinnerton grew up in the Highland Park neighborhood in L.A. – swanky now, not so much 40 years ago – and in his early 20s moved to New York, but not for long. One day, on a break from his job at a printing company, he met a woman on a corner in Brooklyn who happened to be from Santa Cruz. He walked with her for a while when he was supposed to be working. The attraction was instant: Swinnerton moved to Santa Cruz shortly thereafter, and they were married a year later, in 1997.
Over the past dozen years, Swinnerton’s events have been woven into Santa Cruz’s fabric. For him, Event Santa Cruz is not just a business, it’s the vehicle for his creative drive to bring people together in unique ways.
Weekly: Tell me more about your elementary school experience, it sounds like it may have been formative in some way.
Swinnerton: It was a K-12 magnet school – it was a weird kind of experiment that failed. You could come in and say, “I want to do math today.” But what kid would want to do math? So sometimes, I would just draw for weeks. “Sharing” would go on for two hours, and we didn’t have to wear shoes at school – it was super hippie-ish. I did a really bad Santa Claus play one time, but I really liked putting on a show – I became the kid that put on shows. So I emceed our [sixth grade] graduation (I think I was the nerdiest kid in our class), and I said some jokes, and everybody laughed.
I didn’t go back after that, because my parents said, “You don’t even know how to spell.”
So nearly 30 years after sixth grade, you put on your first event. How did that come about?
At some point I lost the desire to do sales. I wanted to make a shiny object people were attracted to, and I did an event, it was a weekend hackathon. So on Friday a bunch of techie people got together and came up with an idea, and pitched it to 200 people in the audience, and they’d say, “OK, I need an engineer, I need a designer” or whatever. All weekend until [3am] they were up working just on their product, and at the end, on Sunday, they show off what they’ve made. It was super fun – I’ve always had the event bug in me.
What did that then lead to?
I’ve always liked entrepreneurs, I like when people do stuff, so I was like, I want to make an event out of this, showcasing people that are doers in our community. So I started a monthly entrepreneur speaker series where people talk about why they do what they do. I always find it so interesting when people have a passion for something and they fully do it.
Tell me more about the vibe you were trying to create at those events.
I’d try to make it different, we would do it in a movie theater, or inside a roastery – we’d always do it in a unique location, just to have a feel to it. When you go to an event – the location, people, food, drink – everything you’re doing should have a certain feel to it. So we did that for about a year-and-a-half, and I started getting offers to do other events – food truck events, block parties – and we just kept expanding.
So what’s your vision for this year’s West End? How will it differ from years past?
There’s a nice part about not knowing everything. There’s a little gap there for things to be different. If you stay the same every single year, it gets stale, it doesn’t have the same spark. I want an 8-year-old, 28-year-old and 88-year-old all to have something for them. We’re just doing one big stage, three to four bands a day – we want to make sure every single thing hits really well.
And we want our opening bands on Saturday and Sunday to be new local bands, two years or less. We want them to be on the main stage.