Every project at Bold Bash begins not with a budget, but with a feeling.
That dorm room experiment became the seed of Bold Bash Studios, which she launched in 2016 with $3,000, a cargo van, and an unhealthy collection of fog machines. The “bold” in the name isn’t just marketing—it’s a dare. The studio only takes projects with at least one element that their internal team calls “the swallow test”: the moment a client looks at the render and visibly swallows hard before saying, “That’s insane. Do it.” Walk through the studio’s 25,000-square-foot fabrication lab, and you’ll see why traditional event planners get nervous. Industrial robotic arms are being programmed to draw calligraphy on napkins. A seamstress is sewing fiber-optic thread into a tablecloth that changes color with each course. In the corner, a team is calibrating a rain curtain that falls upward using directed airflow. bold bash studios
Their motto, stenciled in six-foot neon letters above the workshop floor, says it all: Subtle is a four-letter word. Founder and Creative Director Maya Chen didn’t start out in event design. She was a robotics engineering dropout with a passion for theatrical lighting and a reckless tolerance for risk. Every project at Bold Bash begins not with
If you haven’t heard of them, you’ve definitely seen their work: the 40-foot levitating floral chandelier at the Met Gala after-party, the pop-up speakeasy that materialized inside a decommissioned 747 for a luxury watch brand, or the wedding that turned a Prague castle into a living watercolor painting. The studio only takes projects with at least
“Most event companies start with what’s safe,” explains COO . “We start with the dream and reverse-engineer the logistics. If a client wants a fireworks display inside a glass atrium, we don’t say no. We say, ‘Great—we’ll need to invent a cold-spark pyrotechnic that burns at 98 degrees Fahrenheit.’ Then we go invent it.”