Seat Unique is the luxury ticketing company Londoners call when money is no object. When all your partner wants in life is a Taylor Swift ticket that sold out months ago (Seat Unique still has a few left, albeit for at least £1800). When your team’s performance surpasses expectations and you want tickets to a particular Champion’s League fixture. Or when you want the plushest Formula 1 hospitality - but there’s only two of you and you’re not a corporate bank - Seat Unique will sell it to you.
The five-year-old company, set up by husband and wife Robin Sherry and Phillipa Hicks, has now sold £50 million of tickets to over 100 sports, music and theatre venues on its platform - £25 million of them in the last 12 months.
Inspiration first struck, though, thanks to Adele. “In the early days of our relationship, I wanted to take my Phillipa to see her in concert,” Sherry explains. “But tickets were impossible to get hold of. I found a way in by calling venues to ask for hospitality packages direct - but it was a faff: it took a week to book, so many hard copy forms to fill in, and phone calls. It was worth it - we had a brilliant time, and now she's my wife! But I realised venues were running hospitality purely via large telesales teams, and it was time to digitalise corporate hospitality and offer it direct.”
Sherry, who is 42, and Hicks, 32, were working in complimentary careers in sports corporate hospitality and music marketing at the time. Their first Seat Unique effort was to work on a sleek website: “we spent a lot of time making it easy to use, simple and well-thought-out, and, critically – no waiting rooms. That mass scrabble is one of the biggest turn-offs for people trying to access tickets. You shouldn’t have to set alarms, skip meetings and endlessly hit refresh just to find you’ve not got tickets. Queuing, even virtually, isn’t part of a premium experience.”
Then they knocked on doors of events-makers. “Cold calling at first, and recruiting brand ambassadors,” says Hicks, “plus some less orthodox ways.” Sherry called the agent of Welsh rugby legend Sam Warburton six times - “until one Sunday night he offered me a half-hour slot with Sam. He took a chance on us, and phoned the chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union on our behalf, who offered us a meeting.”
After securing £250,000 backing from angels, Seat Unique launched in September 2019, selling premium tickets to Wales rugby (that meeting paid off) as well as Hampshire cricket tickets. “Our first products were £100 premium seats and £500 full hospitality tickets - like airlines, we were helping events sell their business class equivalent tickets to a much larger market. It was going really well - and then, of course, Covid hit.”
A nascent business hinged on the success of live events was particularly vulnerable. “We cannot put into words how tough [the pandemic] was. We had taken money from our friends and family to get the first iteration of our product out there - only to then have no events to sell!”
Early investors stuck with the Seats Unique team. “And the rebound has been incredible. People had been cooped up for almost 18 months and wanted to be back in the crowds and immersed in live events. This ‘experience economy’ just continues to boom.”
The duo built a list of celebrity and sports ambassadors - including Warburton, former England rugby manager Sir Clive Woodward, ex-England footballer Chris Kamara and England cricketer Lauren Bell - who now plug SeatUnique to their network, run events and promote it on social media, being rewarded with a mixture of shares and cash.
“The great thing about the ticketing industry is that when you offer great experiences, word of mouth spreads like wildfire as everyone wants to know how you get them. The venues realise they can use us to make the most of their inventory.”
Clients including Wembley, Tottenham Hotspur and the NFL now sell their unsold hospitality packages via Seat Unique. “On average we can fuel a 69% growth in new audiences, plus 48% of our ticket-buying happens outside of office hours.”
The start-up has now raised £12 million, with backers including the former boss of Sky Betting, Richard Flint, plus Woodward and Kamara.
“We have doubled sales every year for three consecutive years,” says Hicks, who is proud of expanding the site’s tickets beyond sports and music, recently signing a deal with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s LW Theatres, meaning fans can buy, for example, premium Matilda the Musical tickets at the London Palladium.
Sometimes they even make it off their laptops to events themselves. Hicks has a stand-out memory of taking her mum to see Take That with hospitality. “At one time you’d just never have been able to buy that - the fact that these experiences can now be accessed by anyone - not just corporates and celebrities - makes it all worth it”.
The duo are looking abroad: about a quarter of Seat Unique transactions are tourists coming to UK events, now they’re talking to global Formula 1 circuits and big tennis tournaments to bring more Brits to their events, as well as launching in Sweden, Germany and France, and moving into tennis and horse racing.
“The live events space is buzzing, and we're right at the front of that wave. People want more.”
Founded: September 2019
Turnover: £65m forecast this year
HQ: Victoria
Staff: 47
