Introduction

MINT Festival is an electronic music festival that has been running for about 10 years, moving locations periodically, until 2021 when the owner purchased Newsome Green Farm, Leeds UK. Since then, the festival has been held at this greenfield site, offering the freedom to fully customise the venue. By 2024, it marked its third year at this location, featuring three to four main stages dedicated to electronic music. The event attracts a younger crowd, consisting of a mix of students and young professionals and hosts approximately 7,500 attendees per day over two days.

With so many POS and payments solutions available on the market, it can be challenging to find one that offers both a reliable and personable support system for managing the operational aspects of an event. Additionally, having a system that works seamlessly on a greenfield site, where connectivity may be unreliable, is equally essential. MINT Festival partnered with NOQ to access intuitive POS solutions and support for streamlining their event operations.

Securing Personable and Reliable Support to Assist with Operational Needs

We recently had a conversation with Will Gibson, Venue and Event Manager at MINT Festival to delve into the particular challenges they face and their experience working with NOQ. Navigating the event and festival space with numerous POS systems available can make it challenging to find one that offers both a seamless working product experience and reliable support when needed. For Will Gibson, it was crucial to work with a team where he could rely on knowing exactly who he was interacting with every day. “The hard thing is always trying to find a company that hasn’t gotten to the point where they’re not as personable. We found with NOQ, it’s really easy to work with you guys. We know that we’re speaking to the actual people, as opposed to a call-centre service”, Will explained.

He also highlighted a common problem festivals come across, after having observed other events that he had attended in Leeds, “the system they were using didn’t have the offline payments, so they were kind of stuck for hours not being able to take any payments. That’s a really big one for us.” The challenge therefore, was identifying a system that was reliable and one that could stay operating and taking payments even in areas where connectivity is not the strongest, ensuring that vendors could continue trading and the festival would run smoothly, uninterrupted.

Streamlining Engaging and Dependable Solutions

NOQ provided friendly and dependable support through its exceptional on-site and off-site team, who offered collaborative assistance along with a robust POS and payments solution equipped with intuitive features. Read on to learn exactly how this was achieved.

1. Supportive Off-site Collaboration

Alongside NOQ’s durable, all-in-one POS and payments solution, is our commitment to our clients. Will Gibson emphasised, “There’s been points for which we’ve needed some quite fast assistance at annoying times. I’d say like either 6 in the morning or 10 at night. And we’ve been really lucky to always get a response swiftly on that”. He also mentioned that he particularly liked the overall support and the mutual trust and partnership between MINT Festival and NOQ. “I like the general support day to day and not being too overbearing as well, which for me, especially if I’ve got loads going on, I don’t want to be getting pestered every day of the week. I can trust you guys on your side and vice versa. We both know what we’re doing”. At NOQ, we value our relationships with our clients and encourage transparency, which gives them the platform to work independently, but to also have easy access to the support team throughout the process.

2. Seamless Offline Payments

NOQ’s offline payment capability feature ensures that “down time” doesn’t bring vendor trading to a standstill during an event. All terminals automatically can switch to offline mode allowing sales to continue uninterrupted. As MINT Festival runs on a greenfield site, connectivity may occasionally be disrupted. Therefore, it is essential for them to have a POS system that ensures smooth service operations and provides backup if the WIFI system fails. This NOQ feature also enables 10,000 transactions per terminal to be stored offline. As mentioned earlier, Will emphasised that this feature was essential to their operations, “The offline payments is always a really good one to have on for any event….”

3. Insights and Reporting

The NOQ’s insights app provides festival organisers and all vendors (both internal & external) access to real-time reporting at their fingertips. This means that they can view and analyse sales data by site, stores, timeframe, product, terminal and user. For Will Gibson, this feature puts him at the forefront of event planning, as it places him in a position to forecast demand for future festival days and events. He named this as one of the ways NOQ’s solution has been beneficial to MINT Festival. “The sales tracking and analytics is really good for access throughout the event. What I tend to do is have someone check and track throughout the day to see which bar is doing better. It means we can kind of plan for the following day and for the following year”, he added.

4. Split Payments & Vendor Onboarding

When asked if he made use of the split payment function during the festival and if he at all found it to be useful, he had this much to say, “We do take a commission and that’s all done just straight off the bat through NOQ. It saves us a lot of time as well. Obviously, we still deal with the vendors, but it’s great to have NOQ take on and enrol each vendor themselves. We’re not having to worry about that”. This efficient reconciliation offered by NOQ ensures that less time is spent chasing commission payments and in turn, improves cash flow.

5. User-friendly EPOS System

NOQ’s user-friendly EPOS system meant that there was no on-site support during this year’s festival, as vendors found the system very user-friendly. “It seems to have worked really well from our side. We tend to have a person from our team that is on call to assist if any vendors have any issues with the devices. But for the most part, it is pretty intuitive, and the vendors have a fairly good idea before coming to site. After training through NOQ, that definitely helped quite a lot as well”, said Will.

Recommendation

Based on their experience, Will Gibson said that he would definitely recommend NOQ to other festival organisers and operations teams. “I suppose it just comes down to the ease of the service, the competitive rates and again, having the reliability of someone there to speak to and advise on any issues we have as well”, he added.

Conclusion

NOQ’s partnership with MINT Festival has exemplified how a customer-focused, responsive, and robust POS and payments system can transform event operations. By offering features like offline payments, streamlined multi-vendor management, and real-time sales analytics, NOQ can address the unique challenges of festival environments, ensuring seamless operations even under demanding conditions.

Will Gibson highlighted the critical value of NOQ’s reliable customer support, intuitive system setup, and efficient vendor onboarding processes, which minimised administrative burdens and maximised operational efficiency. Looking ahead, with continued product development and enhancements, such as improved reporting tools, NOQ is well-positioned to support MINT Festival’s growth and evolving needs.