This year’s Patagonia Fall Festival on October 10, 11, and 12 will bring as many as 16,000 people to town. There will be more than a hundred booths, 14 food vendors, and three full days of entertainment. The popular and highly reputed festival features arts and crafts from all over the southwest. For the last 15 years, the person who has made this event happen is Kazz Workizer. If you’ve ever been to the festival on opening day and seen a woman answering questions from people clustered around her while she gives instructions to someone on the phone, logs in vendors, locates their paperwork, and hands out check-in packets, you get some idea of the job she does—and how well she does it.
Kazz has been involved in the Fall Festival since 1994, when she and her husband, Pete, began volunteering at the event, which was then being run by the Patagonia Area Business Association (PABA). Kazz says that PABA’s efforts to organize and man the festival with volunteers and a two-person staff was becoming more difficult each year, so Kazz offered to take on the job for a percentage of the margin. She had a background in marketing, and she and Pete had a lot of experience with nature festivals, having organized and traveled to as many as 21 each year to represent their nature products business.
The event’s attendance has nearly doubled since she took over, and the festival, which was originally two days, is now a three-day event. The third day (Friday) was added in response to requests by exhibitors and some interior design firms, galleries, and other business owners, who said they preferred to come on a day when crowds would be smaller.
Kazz is the owner/operator of Kazzam Events, an event production and promotion enterprise. Her largest event is the Fall Festival, which she organizes and oversees with the help of three or four volunteers and four paid staff members. Her preparations for each year’s festival begin a year in advance. At each festival, Kazz collects applications from vendors who commit to return and updates her database of exhibitors. During the year, she also does a mail out to potential exhibitors and an extensive list of festival goers who have requested that they be sent a “reminder” about the next festival, and by July she sends letters again to check in with all the vendors.
A volunteer jury reviews all the entries, and Kazz informs each applicant of their decision. As September approaches, she sends out press releases, arranges for program and ad design, and purchases ad space in local and out-of-town publications. With the help of a few volunteers and a professional distribution service, she passes out thousands of programs and hundreds of posters in Tucson’s Metro area, at the Art in the Park Festival in Sierra Vista, and in other neighboring towns.
Her “To Do” list is long. She arranges for the delivery of tables, chairs, and portable toilets; prepares check-in packets; marks off and identifies each booth space in the park; and addresses a myriad of questions and complaints. When the festival begins, she must be prepared to field questions and resolve problems throughout the event.
It’s a tremendous undertaking, and Kazz says its biggest challenges have been finding volunteers, covering expenses, and keeping up with the physical demands of her job. After setting up tents and the information and silent auction areas, she spends three days on her feet, walking from one end of the park to the other to check in with exhibitors and customers and to deal with issues that arise. Serious knee problems are making this more and more difficult.
Despite the success of the festival, costs have exceeded profits in recent years. The reason, says Kazz, is the expense of three days of music, which now runs over $7,000. Without that expense, the festival would be putting that money in the bank, but music seems to be an important part of the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, Kazz says she’d be willing to continue working with the exhibitors for the event if others were able to take on the general and financial management, logistics, publicity, and set up. Says Kazz, “my body and my budget just can’t keep up with the festival.”
She plans to return to her work as a fiber and bead artist at the farm she owns in Elgin and hopes that someone else can step in and take over the 2015 festival. Although she admits that she would miss the contact with festival vendors and visitors, she says, “I’m looking forward to getting back to creating art instead of marketing it.” Her departure will present a challenge, as new management considers how to ensure a healthy profit and inspire the participation of more volunteers, so that the Fall Festival can continue to thrive.