Bronson van Wyck is the picture of southern hospitality. Growing up on a farm in a remote part of northeastern Arkansas, he learned the art of entertaining early on in his life, mostly out of necessity.
"It was a trip — people had come a long way to get there," van Wyck recently told Business Insider. "There wasn't a lot going on there, so we were responsible for entertaining, and we have a really big family."
After graduating from Yale, van Wyck went on to organize nightly receptions as a protocol aide to US Ambassador Pamela Harriman in Paris, before making his way to Hollywood and set design. Since 1999, he and his mother, Mary Lynn, and sister, Mimi, have been putting their hosting skills to good use, planning events for the most high-end of clients — think superstars like Beyonce, Madonna, and Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton — through their event production firm, Van Wyck & Van Wyck.
Van Wyck's taste is theatrical. For his 40th birthday party in 2015, for example, guests donned extravagant costumes and headdresses that made them look like wild animals, with van Wyck himself in a cape covered in peacock feathers.
Earlier this year, the Van Wyck team launched a new company out of their production firm. Called Workshop, the new company focuses on producing similarly high-octane events for brands like Coach, Mercedes-Benz, Hermes, and Range Rover.
"If we can make someone love something, they will not only buy it, they will also go and tell everyone they know," van Wyck said. "We're reaching the next level of emotional engagement, and you get there by having moments where people have fun."
We stopped by a recent branded event put on by Workshop to get a sense of what a Bronson van Wyck party is really like.
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We snagged an invite to the annual Summer Party to benefit Friends of the High Line, which funds the well-known elevated park in Manhattan. Several thousand stylish people showed up for the fundraiser, including popular young fashionistas like Chloe Grace Moretz, Hailey Baldwin, and Meghan Trainor.
An inner passage of the High Line was transformed to fit the party's "urban jungle" theme. Van Wyck told us it took the team two full days and a night to assemble the leafy decor.
Setup time can vary from event to event, van Wyck told us. For an event he worked on at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, for example, he and his team had a full two months to deck out the ballroom, which stretches over an acre of space. For a different event with the New York Public Library, they had only two hours.
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