Caroline Leopold was bracing herself. Fingers at the ready, the 25-year-old was stationed at her MacBook, preparing to send roughly 200 individual iMessages. For the next tedious hour and a half, Leopold dragged a JPEG with her tastefully designed, block-letter invite into the app’s blinking gray box, shooting a digital flyer for her upcoming party at New York’s Flower Shop bar to the phones of individual invitees, one by one. Leopold would then proceed to track responses (sent back to her via text) in a separate Excel spreadsheet.
“When a party is handled with that level of care, the payoff is enormous. The party is so much better,” says Leopold, who throws frequent events under the host name Unnecessoirée. “But is it scalable? Not really.”
For an entirely digital effort, Leopold’s routine feels analog—the texting equivalent of licking 200 stamps and sticking them on 200 envelopes. And it begs a question being asked by many party-throwing twenty-somethings these days—isn’t there an easier way to do this?
