During the lockdown in 2020 when the pandemic hit, as founding partner of modern fine dining concept Preludio, we brainstormed methods to keep the business afloat. One of these strategies was to introduce the concept of “Tough Time Tickets” – where we offered pre-sale of reservations at an attractive price to be redeemed on a later date. This allowed us to maintain cashflow for the business at a time when dining out was prohibited.

When we first announced these tickets on 19 March 2020, we sold out of 50 tickets within 3 days. Seeing the popular demand, we then increased the number of tickets and within just 12 days of launching we sold a total of 150 tickets, netting us $30k in revenue.

Seeing how much it helped our business, we decided to extend this initiative to our fellow restauranteurs to help the industry – we believed that the more people are involved, the wider our reach would be.

We registered the domain toughtimetickets.com on 26 March 2020 and started selling merely one week later by 2 April.

My role

To bring this whole initiative from a mere idea to fruition, I executed a range of duties:

• Developed an eCommerce solution to sell the tickets
  • Designed and developed a website
  • Sourced for and installed a payment module to accept sales funds deposited directly into our partner’s accounts
  • Designed the ‘ticket’ email that users receive
  • Automated a system to collate ticket sales data to generate sales reports
• Recruited partner restaurants to join our cause
  • Created a proposal deck to present the concept and reached out to fellow restaurateurs and chefs
  • Created a user flow to illustrate the user journey to our partners
  • Drew up and executed service agreements to ensure each party would fulfil their obligations
• Liasing & support for the participating restaurants
  • Liaised with the restaurants to gather relevant information for onboarding
  • Drew up a Standard Operating Procedure to guide restaurants on how the tickets could be redeemed
• Marketing & PR
  • Designed a logo and key visual
  • Created and maintained a social media profile
  • Shared our branding assets with our partner restaurants for them to post on their social media
  • Reached out to our media partners to pitch them the story of this initiative

Press coverage