Fancy yourself as a bit of a cupid? Staging a successful dating event in 2018 takes more than putting a bunch of singles in a room.

With dating apps like Tinder offering the possibility to meet hundreds of local singles with a swipe, today’s dater is looking for an entirely more sophisticated experience to tempt them away from tech. Fun and quirky activities that promise to entertain, as well as presenting opportunities for romance, are necessary to steal their hearts and secure ticket sales.

Smudged Lipstick has grown to become the biggest dating event brand in London by offering exactly that. Founder Jordi Sinclair believes the days of the traditional singles night are numbered.

“A lot of dating events have come and gone in the last year and a half we’ve been doing them. It’s a lot more difficult than people think. It takes more than setting up tables, giving people name tags and shoving them together,” he says.

Smudged Lipstick specialises in ‘alternative’ dating events, which see participants getting friendly with one another while drawing a nude, coming up with rude words for Scrabble, or playing Cards Against Humanity.

“We wanted it to be a dating event that didn’t feel like a dating event and to appeal to that person who had never done a dating event before. All our dating events have distractions like life drawing, chocolate tasting, Play-Doh model making and games. So, worst case scenario, if you meet someone you don’t click with, you’re only going to have to play Jenga with them for five minutes. It’s not like an interview. You don’t have to feel awkward sitting across from someone with nothing to talk about.”

Jordi describes the dating event scene prior to the launch of Smudged Lipstick as a “horrible place to go”. His company is designed as the antithesis of what he experienced as a singleton (post nasty break-up).

He explains: “I started a blog called thirtysomethinglondon.com to write about life as a single guy and off the back of that I started getting invited to a lot of dating events. They were all the same; mixers with name tags, full of the socially inept. I’d blog about that and despair that there wasn’t something else – I mean this was London.

“A lot of the events were focused on “meet the one”, “love is just around the corner” and had love hearts everywhere. People don’t necessarily want that when they’re single; they want to have fun. I could see there was a massive gap in the market.”

It is a sad truth that, despite the rise of digital dating, finding a partner is now actually much harder. Jordi says this is because tech has caused a disconnect from real interaction and has cheapened the experience by making connecting too easy.

“People find dating much harder because they’ve got more choice. If people are going on a date they’ve found from Tinder, and it’s pretty good but not perfect, they know they’ve got 20 other people via the app they can meet in the next week. One of those might be that 10 out of 10 so they’re like, ‘meh, next!’.”

Additionally, communicating through text has eroded our ability to have conversations. As a result, the need for assisting people with relationship-building is becoming more acute: “When I rejoined the dating scene, I found that digital had changed the way people communicated; all of a sudden people were amazing at texting and emailing but when it came to having a normal conversation, body language, tone of voice and eye contact went out the window. You could have great banter on text but get in front of them and the conversation stalled.”

In response, Smudged Lipstick has hired relationship coach Arti Joshi as its Operations Manager to provide her expertise in communication. Jordi expects to see a growth in dating events incorporating coaching.

“We’re aimed at 25-40 year-olds so we don’t get many people in their late teens and early twenties, but I think when these millennials do get to the stage where they might not have had a meaningful relationship, they’re going to need more help. I can already see in the dating industry how many matchmakers, dating coaches and relationship coaches there are out there, running incredibly successful business, and I can only see that growing.”

According to Jordi, the unsatisfying experiences so many singletons are having with digitally facilitated dating are now actually fuelling a need for in-person events.

“What we’ve found through our research is that the market goes in waves. People will initially be very digitally focused because it’s easy. They do that for a while and then they’re like, ‘I’m over the whole liking and swiping and scrolling’. They get sick of the digital detachment that comes from judging someone from a photo on screen or texting for four weeks and never actually meeting someone. They want to go out and do stuff, so you’ll have that curve, and then people will be more events focused.”

What’s more, the men who attend dating events are more likely to be looking for love (rather than a one-night stand) than in the past.

“Guys looking for a hook-up have it so easy these days; they can do it from their sofa while watching the footie, so the ones who do turn up are generally looking for a relationship. They tend to book individually, whereas the girls come in groups of two or three and see the event as just a good time, with meeting someone as a by-product.

“It’s really interesting because guys will judge the event on whether they meet someone or not. The girls’ feedback will be, ‘I had an amazing time’ even if they didn’t match with anyone. They’ll give it five out of five stars, but the guys will come back with three or four stars out of five – not based on how good an event it was, but because they didn’t get any matches.”

Despite the more earnest intentions of men attending dating events these days, getting an even ratio of men to women remains a challenge. The difficulty in selling male tickets came as a surprise to Jordi who had only previously run corporate events.

“I quickly found that the market is great to sell female tickets, but male tickets is tough. It was a struggle in the beginning because I’d find myself in a situation where I’d sold 15 girls’ tickets and one ticket to a guy, and I had to cancel a lot. I had to completely re-strategise everything from start to finish when it came to ticket sales. I had to make sure all the events were online at least two months in advance so it gave us enough time to sell the tickets.”

And while the potential market for dating events in London is large (44% of adults are unmarried), you’ve got to be prepared to work hard when it comes to marketing, says Jordi.

“I’ve worked really hard on the SEO, making sure we’re on every ticketing platform we can. Eventbrite is a great one because we find once someone buys a ticket, they generally become a repeat customer.

“We’re really hot on the offline stuff too, so making sure all our venues have our flyers and our posters. In addition to this, our newsletter goes out once a week. We do a blog post every Monday with cool date ideas in London and a post every second Thursday about communication and relationships. We’re building good, core regular content that people can feed into that isn’t just about our events. That helps us build our community.”

This strategy has helped Smudged Lipstick win ‘Dating Events Brand of the Year’ for the last two years at the UK Dating Awards and amass a 270-strong event waiting list.

And with more people pledging to “make the effort and get out there” in the new year, January has brought a further spike in interest – especially with the spectre of Valentine’s Day on the horizon. Not ones to adhere to convention, Smudged Lipstick is planning an anti-Valentine’s celebration, where people can share stories of their worst dates for everyone’s amusement.

Jordi says that the unusual nature of their events helps them to attract great attendees: “Because we do some really fun, cool, weird stuff, the people who turn up are those who are a bit more open and want to do fun, cool, weird stuff too. They’re outgoing and up for a laugh and we don’t have anyone languishing in a corner thinking ‘what am I doing here?’ or looking at their phones all night – we actually ban phones at our events. Our reputation for attracting good people is second to none and that word of mouth is really important.”

Due to its success, Smudged Lipstick now plans to launch franchise events in cities around the UK, starting in Manchester.

“Every city in the UK is dying for this,” says Jordi. “It’s just a matter of working out the franchise model, which is quite costly and getting the right people on board as hosts. We need the right people on the ground in the cities.”

Finding venues, however, will be less of a task, with managers increasingly recognising the value dating events represent.

“We get pitched to about six times a day by venues. If we guarantee we’ll add 30 people buying drinks they’re pretty happy to do that but we only want venues that meet certain criteria in terms of character. We want that wow factor; we don’t want to just shove our attendees into any place because we get it for nothing.

“We also want venues that have a big online presence that are quite well known because they’re going to tweet about it, put it on their website, on Facebook and in their newsletter. We have an agreement with them that they do that a certain amount of times because, the way I see it, it’s a partnership.”

Looking to the future, I wonder if Jordi will consider integrating digital into the Smudged Lipstick brand?

“I don’t think so. We get a lot of repeat business, not just because people want to find love but because they had an amazing time – and you can’t replicate that digitally. A lot of our competitors will use an app or say, ‘go online the day after to select who you want to meet’ but we still do it with pen and paper. We like to retain that physical sides of things and that nostalgia.

“Most people that come to our events are still on some dating app in one form or another, but there’s enough scope for people to do both.”

What are your experiences of running or attending dating events? Join the discussion over on the EventTribe forum.