Waterbourne

Waterbourne is a beach festival in New Zealand which has been running a few times in Wellington and having its first appearance in Auckland in 2021. The line up spreads across 23 days and has free events on 19 days with four ticketed events. SilverStripers were tasked to build the Waterbourne.co.nz website, the underlying ticketing and registrations system and the event scanner mobile app. The project was a collaborative effort between SilverStripers and Squid Group, a digital agency in Auckland, New Zealand.

At the initial meetings with Squid Group, we discussed how we are going to build the CMS to suit the information architecture of the website. We wanted to stick to a plan where we wanted to give the Waterbourne team full control over the website’s content, look and feel and the page structures. By carefully going through each of the components we came up with an Elemental approach and included various style options on the website to change colors, spacings of these components.

Silverstripers had a few discovery sessions to design the event registration platform. A few key requirements were to

• Have flexible prices for events.
• Manage each section on the event location with their seating capacities.
• Resale of tickets.
• Email users with customised PDF tickets with QR codes.
• Collect various event-specific information from users (date of birth, medical information, etc)
• Enable registrations for free events
• Up sell optional extra products.
• Build a solution which can be reused for other events 

Having all these requirements in mind, we made an event database which works as the data source for the Waterbourne website. The event database stores all the information about events, purchases, participants, pricing, stocks etc. It contains a GraphQL API for the website to connect. From the start we wanted to build a faster system, hence we chose ReactJS, which runs completely on the website user’s browser. The system was integrated with Stripe payment gateway to collect payments.

We built a cross-platform mobile app using React Native to scan tickets on the event day. The app has a mobile scanner which connects to the events database via a GraphQL API. When a ticket is being scanned it displays all the optional extras the user has purchased with the ticket allowing them to redeem those as they require. And once it is redeemed the database gets updated.

The quality of work we achieved was only made possible because of the support and the levels of communications we managed with Squid Group. It was an honor to build an amazing system which is beautiful and robust.