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Project · Bespoke Event Management System
Lakeland Life Events are Cumbria's leading street food event organisers — managing events from small private functions to major public festivals across the region. The business represents over 50 handpicked vendors across eight categories, runs multiple events simultaneously across multiple venues, and handles the full lifecycle of every event from initial client enquiry through vendor assignment, on-the-day delivery, and post-event financial reconciliation. None of that fits in spreadsheets at the scale the business operates.
Event lifecycle dashboard
Draft, Upcoming, Active, Completed, Cancelled — every event tracked through its full lifecycle with all related records linked.
Vendor directory across 8 categories
Food, Outside Catering, Security, Entertainment, Stalls, Music, First Aid, Bar & Alcohol — every supplier indexed and assignable.
Vendor applications
Pending Applications tab manages prospective vendors through to approval and active status — controlled growth of the supplier base.
Client & order records
Every event linked to a client record and an order record covering scope, pricing, supplier assignments, and delivery status.
Financial reporting
Reports section consolidates orders and supplier costs into revenue and margin reporting per event and across the portfolio.
WordPress today, React tomorrow
V1 was a WordPress-embedded plugin. V2 is being rebuilt as a standalone React application with an expanded data model and richer UI.
Bespoke, not SaaS
There is no commercial off-the-shelf SaaS that handles street food event organisation the way Lakeland Life Events runs it. Generic event management tools handle conferences, ticketing, registrations. They do not handle a vendor directory of food traders, a category model that distinguishes between security and entertainment and bar, or a workflow that walks an event from a client enquiry through vendor assignment to on-the-day operational logistics. The business model is specific, and the system has to fit it.
This is the work Technophobia is built for. Real businesses with real operational complexity that don't fit a generic SaaS — and where a properly built bespoke platform produces an immediate operational improvement.
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The first version of the EMS was a WordPress-embedded admin plugin. Five core sections — Events, Suppliers, Clients, Orders, Reports — each backed by custom database tables and a tailored admin UI. The Events section managed the full event lifecycle through five status states. The Suppliers section maintained the active vendor directory plus a Pending Applications workflow.
Real events ran through V1, including the Whitehaven Weekender Festival, the Whitehaven World Cup Event at Marina Arena, Eat Street Cumbria at Maryport Event Area, and table hire jobs across venues including Borrowdale Village Hall. V1 proved the model — and showed what V2 had to be.
Why React
WordPress plugin admin frameworks have well-understood ceilings. As the business grew through V1 — more vendors, more event categories, more reporting requirements, more concurrent users — the constraints of the WordPress admin became visible. The decision was made to rebuild from scratch as a dedicated React application: a standalone platform with its own front end, its own architecture, and its own expanded data model, designed to grow with the business rather than within plugin framework constraints.
The V2 rebuild incorporates everything V1 proved was needed — event lifecycle management, the supplier directory with category filtering and pending application workflow, client records, order tracking, financial reporting — and extends each with a richer data model and a more capable user interface.
Where V1 was a WordPress admin extension, V2 is a purpose-built application with the architectural flexibility to support the business at the scale it now operates.
Vendor directory
The vendor directory was the most operationally valuable part of V1 and is the structural centre of V2. 22 active registered vendors as of V1, spread across Food, Outside Catering, Security, Entertainment, Stalls, Music, First Aid, and Bar & Alcohol. Each vendor carries a vendor number, business name, contact details, category, and active status. The Pending Applications tab manages prospective vendors through to active. As the business grows, the directory grows — and the platform handles that scaling cleanly.
This is bespoke development, not a productised package. The work is scoped after a discovery call, quoted as a fixed-price project at our standard rate of £75 plus VAT per hour for custom WordPress, with a 50% uplift for React work. V1 was substantial. V2 is more substantial still — a full standalone React application built to grow with the business for years.
The pricing reflects the depth of the build. The output is a platform genuinely tailored to the business — not a SaaS subscription paid forever for software that does not quite fit.
What this proves
A specialist Cumbrian events business can have a custom-built event management platform that no SaaS product on the market actually provides — and Technophobia is the team that builds it. Through V1's live operational use and V2's React-based rebuild, the engineering and the business knowledge are both proven. If you operate a business with operational complexity that off-the-shelf software simply does not fit, this is the kind of work we exist to do.
50+
Handpicked vendors
8
Vendor categories
5
Core EMS sections
£75/hr
Custom dev + VAT (+50% React)
Who else this works for
Client feedback
How we'd build yours
Discovery call. 30-45 minutes to understand the business operation, the pain points off-the-shelf software causes, and the data model your system actually needs to capture. We sketch the platform shape against the real operation.
Written specification & fixed-price quote. We produce a detailed written specification, a milestone breakdown, and a fixed-price total at £75 plus VAT per hour (+50% for React). You see exactly what you're getting and what it costs before any code is written.
Iterative build, real-world use, V2 if needed. V1 deploys and goes into operational use. Where the business grows beyond V1 (as Lakeland Life Events did), V2 follows — scoped against everything V1 proved was needed plus the next set of business requirements.
Common questions
Running a business that doesn't fit any SaaS on the market? Let's talk about a bespoke build that fits your operation, not the other way round.
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