More Brands Are Producing Their Own Summits: Here's the Lounge We Built for Create & Cultivate Offsite in NYC
Something is shifting in how brands show up for their communities. After years of building online audiences, more and more companies are now producing their own live summits, bringing together followers, customers, and fans in person. According to Bizzabo's 2025 State of Events Report, 57% of event organizers saw attendance at in-person conferences and summits grow over the past year, and community-facing events are now the top priority for more than half of all organizers. The appetite for face-to-face connection is real, and brands are meeting it with their own custom programming.
Create & Cultivate, the women in business media and conference brand, has been doing this for a while now, and doing it well. A while back, we got to work on their Offsite event at Industry City in Brooklyn, a full day of panels, workshops, and mentor sessions for a community of women entrepreneurs. We handled the event furniture rental for their NYC outdoor lounge, the space between sessions where attendees came to grab food and drinks, sit down, and actually connect with each other.
Building the Lounge Around the Brand
Create & Cultivate came to us directly with a clear brief: the lounge needed to feel cohesive with their brand, and that meant red and white throughout. That's where everything started.
We built the lounge around our Multi-Level Pallet Lounge as the focal point in the center of the space, with Pallet Sofas scattered around the outskirts facing inward, creating a natural draw toward the middle. Cabana-striped cushions in red and white ran throughout, with solid-red accent pillows layered on top, and Flattered tables placed around the space for drinks and snacks. Create & Cultivate added their own matching umbrellas and branded signage, and when everything came together, the lounge felt like a natural extension of the brand, not just outdoor seating at a conference.
The cabana stripe gave the whole space an elevated, retreat-style feel, the kind of setup guests actually want to linger in rather than a quick stop before the next session.
Why Brand Summits in NYC Need Intentional Seating Areas
Brand summits, whether large-scale conferences or more intimate community gatherings, need seating areas that feel as considered as the programming inside. When the furniture matches the brand palette, it does much of the work on its own. We hear this from brands all the time: they want the lounge to feel like an extension of their own office, like the furniture could have come straight from their headquarters. And for the kind of brands producing summits today, that's not a boring ask. Their offices are colorful, playful, and design-forward, and their event spaces should be too.
And when the layout is inviting enough to pull people into real conversation, the mingling that happens there is often the best part of the day (We hear this more than you'd think).
Pallet furniture works well for this kind of activation because it's communal and inviting, and makes guests feel welcome. The guards are down, and this leads to more real connections. The configurations can scale up or down depending on how much space you're working with.
If you're planning a brand summit, conference, or brand activation in New York City and need event furniture rental that fits your look and your footprint, we'd love to help. Contact us to talk through layout and furniture options for your event.
Browse our NYC collection or our Rent The Look gallery for inspiration.