For the past four years, Vivienne Errington-Barnes has arranged an elaborate group kidnapping: ten blindfolded and gagged people are bundled into a van, dropped into a derelict warehouse packed with militants, and given clues and tools that help the intrepid participants muddle their way out.
“It costs around $1 million for 10 people,” Errington-Barnes said. Her “kidnap package” includes numerous locations, dozens of actors, fire, smoke, and fog machines. “It’s an intense experience, but ultra-high-net-worth individuals are obsessed with it.”
Errington-Barnes is the CEO of Shift + Alt Events, a bespoke San Francisco and London-based event-planning company that caters to ultra-high-net-worth clients, many of them in tech. She has become known as the woman to call when your party needs are outlandish and money is no object.
She’s rented a real-life medieval castle in England for a weeklong birthday party described as “Burning Man meets ‘Bridgerton.’” She’s designed an elaborate 50-person festival in a Nevada forest that included a swearing master class and orgasmic breath workshop. She’s hosted a venture capitalist’s psychedelic, faerie-themed 40th birthday party in a Los Altos mansion. And she’s thrown a laser-filled launch party for crypto platform Solana’s new fund.
Errington-Barnes plans around 100 events per year, with budgets ranging from $50,000 to $5 million for everything from private retreats to brand launches and conferences. “I’ve always been obsessed with events,” she said. “We all have limited time, and the best way to spend that time is intentionally.”
The event planner, who splits her time between London and San Francisco, launched Shift + Alt Events in March 2020, a time when any in-person events were few and far between. She says she spends nothing on marketing; clients come to her solely via referral. “For this particular client base, that’s the only way they trust someone,” she said. “They’re incredibly private, incredibly sensitive. … It’s a very closed kind of global community.”
Most of her clients and their guests aren’t comfortable being identified publically, but she had permission to namedrop a few, including model-actress Cara Delevingne; Gerardo Carucci, the former event director for Apple; Esther Crawford, a director of product at Meta; Robert Cowherd, founder of Fable, a neuroscience-based healing retreat; and Greg King, founder of Osprey Funds.
This secrecy — some of which stems from security concerns (and fear of public embarrassment) — is why there’s so little info on the parties of the uber rich. “They don’t want people to use their name. They don’t want people taking photos. They use a code name,” Errington-Barnes said. She was, however, willing to pull back the curtain a smidge to give The Standard a glimpse of how ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals like to let loose.
‘They really care about trapping people’
A common theme among the uber-rich: They “really care about trapping people,” said Errington-Barnes. To ensure their friends stay for the duration of the party, her clients will intentionally pick remote venues. Earlier this year, Errington-Barnes threw a birthday party on a mountain peak, which could be accessed only by helicopter.
“If you’re not having a good time, you can’t just leave within 30 minutes,” she said of the event. However, she noted that many billionaires and millionaires have equally loaded friends, who in this case could circumvent being stuck by using their own helicopter or jet to escape.
Planning these parties takes anywhere from two weeks or two years, with the process typically involving “therapy sessions.” “Everybody feels like their event is a reflection of them as a person,” she says.
Errington-Barnes grew up in England, and began her career in finance, with a role that included project-managing some events. She transitioned into the startup space, moving to San Francisco to manage partnerships for Vinebox, a subscription wine startup, before becoming chief of staff for Calm, a meditation app with a $1 billion valuation.
She threw large, elaborate, immersive events for Calm’s partners and staff, while also hosting smaller, intimate soirees. “This gave me the foundation for what our high-net-worth clients want,” she said. After receiving multiple inquiries from her network about planning gigs, she realized the demand for her skills, and Shift + Alt was born.
Themed events and costume parties are eternally popular, Errington-Barnes said, with many hosts providing guests with free hairdressers, makeup artists, and even prosthetic specialists, as well as a costume closet for attire. “We have staggered arrival times, and guests enter through a side door, so no one sees them before they’re prepared,” she said.
She often adds tech touches to her events; a big trend right now is water projection, in which lasers beam images onto the spray released by a waterfall. Robots are also in vogue: Errington-Barnes has used autonomous serving bots that circulate with canapes, as well as hired actors in 12-foot robo-suits. “They shoot fire or smoke out of robo-guns — they have lights, they make it exciting,” she said.
She also fabricates items on-demand. One client requested a 6-foot-tall, three-dimensional ice cream cone, in which the cherry on top resembled their face. “They wanted people to take selfies with it,” she said.
Also gaining traction among the super-rich is hostile environment awareness, or HEAT training, something typically used for NGOs entering conflict zones. In 2023, she sent one group of men in their 40s to HEAT-train in Italy, and two more groups to the British Cotswolds, where they all paid big bucks to be tormented. “The trainers don’t hold back. They’re really putting you in a situation,” she said. “They put a bag over your head, put you in a stress position.”
Errington-Barnes tried HEAT training herself to vet it for her clients. “It was scary for me, and boundary-pushing,” she said. “Part of being an event planner is being a control freak. We don’t have to do this stuff, but we don’t trust other people to do it.”
Originality is key, and she has some fun, new things in the works. For instance, an animatronic-heavy, “Beetlejuice”-themed Halloween party for xyz, a San Francisco venture capital firm.
In 2025, she’s organizing a decadently immersive “experience your own death” party for a Bay Area tech founder and 200 guests. The plan involves a large train carriage, which will be located within a two-hour flight of SFO. “You get on the train and all the windows are TV screens showing your reincarnation journey — and it gets more surreal,” said Errington-Barnes. “There are actors on the train, and you can’t get off until you figure out why you’re there. … You don’t know who’s an actor and who’s a guest.”
On the more whimsical side, one recent client who ordered up a medieval-themed party in a French castle asked that each guest be announced via trumpeter. In concept, it seemed like a good idea, but a trumpet “going off every five minutes” was annoying. “I said, ‘Hey, this is actually ruining the experience, can we just have one trumpet and leave it?’ … But they were obsessed with the trumpet,” Errington-Barnes said. “It was challenging.”
No matter how long Errington-Barnes has been at it, her clients consistently surprise her with their ideas. One asked her to organize a billionaire fight club in New York, although the timing didn’t work out in the end. Another requested that she rent a Latvian prison for their bachelor party before later changing their mind.
Other times, it’s a great mind-meld between client and planner. When Paul McSharry, founder of Osiris Club — a luxury wine club with an $80,000 initiation fee for its VIP tier — approached her about creating a launch party, he wanted something immersive and esoteric.
“We approached this as interpreting the wine for the five senses,” said Errington-Barnes. “For sight, we had dancers twirling in cones of light, and for sound we had a classical musician playing in the dark, and when they reached their crescendo the light came in like a sunrise.”
This is what makes the job magic, and why Errington-Barnes is OK with the long hours — and the sometimes inconceivable asks. “Our goal is to make that perfect, curated event … and manage expectations that some things won’t be possible,” she said.
“But, you know, with enough funds, you can pretty much make everything happen.”