Juan Arnau remembers that summer, when he was little, that his parents went to tour Europe by car, rave in rave (electronic party), looking for trends and artists to bring to the club that they and their grandparents turned into one of the cardinal points of electronic music in Spain, Florida135. Also how the family would get together on Sundays, after mass, to eat and discuss the previous night’s session. And the day when his parents nervously smoked on the balcony because a week before the Monegros festival they still had thousands of tickets unsold… Now, he and his sister, Cruz, are at the helm of Elrow, the brand that has inherited these memories and sleepless nights, the most recent in a dynasty of leisure whose origins date back to a café opened more than 150 years ago.
Just as the celebrations of a handful of families can gauge the future of a pinch of the Ibex 35, in the Arnau living room they have been taking the pulse of entertainment for years. “I think we would not have survived 160 years if there was not a passionate relationship with entertainment, with making young people have a good time,” says Arnau, co-founder and global brand manager of this company that invoices more than 55 million euros with its festivals and shows, via video call.
The first to enjoy this saga were, back in 1870, the men who went to the café and social club that Arnau’s paternal great-great-grandfather set up in Fraga, Huesca, and that his granddaughter and her husband revived after the founder’s closure and death. On its foundations they created a small conglomerate – which included a bar, a theatre converted into a cinema and another summer theatre – which was threatened when a couple, who had arrived in the town years before after fleeing the political antagonism of their families, opened their own cinema, the Florida. The competition between the two couples came to a standstill when the only daughter of one and the first-born of the other, Arnau’s grandparents, fell in love.
“It was founded in 1942 and we transformed it from a cinema into a lounge. And then we started with dancing,” says Arnau about the origins of the Florida135 club, which opened in the mid-eighties in the space that had previously been occupied by the Saloon Florida, next to the projection room. There they opened the door to electronic music, which continues to be the company’s flagship. “It was 31 years ago when they decided to hold the first festival, the first rave “Illegal on the Monegros estate,” he says. On that plot of land in the desert, which Arnau’s great-great-grandfather lost in a game of cards and later recovered, 200 people met for the first time in 1993. Last year, more than 50,000 people attended the event.
Elrow, or version 1.0 of what it is today, officially took off on a Sunday morning in 2010 at Row14, a nightclub that the family had opened in 2008 in Viladecans, Barcelona, and which succeeded RowCLUB, launched years earlier in another location. “The model was very burnt out, very saturated. There were many clubs in Barcelona and Spain doing the same thing,” recalls the 42-year-old from Fraga. “We almost went bankrupt. We lost two or three million and when we were about to close, my father said to us: ‘Hey, why don’t we do some matinees on Sunday morning? ‘”
The brothers did not want Elrow to be a despues de “It was not just a normal concept, but, says Arnau, a concept in which people would get up in the morning and go fresh to live a different experience. “At that time my father was a bit disengaged and we were the ones who gave it shape and love.” In 2012, the project made its way onto the Ibizan scene and two years later it was launched in one of the island’s flagship clubs, Space. “There the brand started to gain a lot of weight, we started to sell more than 5,000 tickets every weekend and promoters from all over the world started to call us.”
At that time, the family was managing another club in Barcelona called Ker, which opened in 2013, the same year that Row14 closed. The business, says Arnau, was working, but they decided to focus on festivals. “Florida is obviously the romantic part of the family, because it all started there,” he says about the only club they still have. “But we didn’t have that sentimental attachment to a club in Barcelona. And we almost wanted to let it die on purpose to put all our energies into Elrow and Monegros.”
The Arnaus saw that the project had international potential, but they needed to focus their efforts. During the first few years they invested without a clear strategy, moving resources between brands, which had uneven results. “And that’s when we realised, in 2014, that either we put the company in order or we could go bankrupt by doing too many things without any kind of order.” To do so, and after a year and a half of crisis, they considered two options: open up the capital or take out a new mortgage. They opted for the first and the Providence Equity Partners fund became a partner in the company, now the majority shareholder, at the beginning of 2017.
Growth
Last year, some 800,000 people danced to the rhythm of Elrow. In 2024, they hope to sell a million tickets for the 70 or so shows they hold in more than twenty countries. “The largest format we have is Elrow Town, which are our own festivals. They are formats for between 30,000 and 50,000 people,” says the co-founder. “Then we have about 20, 30 shows, which we call XXL, for between 10,000 and 20,000 people,” he adds. Both models, together with the Monegros Desert Festival, are responsible for the majority of the turnover and profit, the figure of which they do not detail. The shows that they take to the stages of other festivals and the residencies in clubs complete the catalogue.
The company, with a permanent staff of 130 people and around 300 freelancers in the high season, is growing by around 15% annually. “Discounting Covid,” says Arnau. For the near future, Elrow is looking to the United States and Asia and is betting on innovation. The business, says the co-founder, is going “very well,” but in a context of recession – fueled by rising costs and a bloated supply – which, he says, is already showing its face in some pioneering markets, these two bets can make the difference.
“When the public has to choose and spend 100 euros, they think very carefully about which festival to go to,” he reflects. “People will go to promoters who make a much greater creative effort.” Geographical diversification, on the other hand, helps to balance possible crises and declines in certain territories. “It is the advantage of being present in many countries. That is why I am very clear that it is very important to become very strong in the USA and in Asia,” he says. “For me, it is a very important focus that the company becomes big there in the next five years.”
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