Lux Picnics

Lux Picnics Ann Arbor was a service business that set up luxury pop-up picnics for two to twelve people: dates, anniversaries, birthdays, the occasional bachelorette. I ran it with my brother Yoel, 50/50. I handled operations, the build, and customer service; he handled marketing and helped with setups.

Joining the StartUM entrepreneurship incubator at Michigan meant showing up with an idea to pitch. While scrambling for one, I came across a video of two teenagers in Los Angeles whose luxury-picnic company was blowing up on social media. It checked every box: simple, unique, inexpensive to start, high margin.

Every luxury picnic I could find was in a large, warm city like LA, the Bay Area, or Miami. Nobody was doing it in Ann Arbor, and a business that can't operate through a Michigan winter scares off competition. It looked like the perfect summer job.

My mom and girlfriend helped me pick out the supplies: cushions, plates, placemats, and decorations. They understand aesthetics far better than I do, so I delegated most of those decisions to them. The table I built myself. I was getting into woodworking at the time, so I did everything from scratch: gluing up individual planks, sanding it all down, and adding screw-on legs to make transport and assembly easy.

It took far longer than buying one, but it was the part of starting the business I enjoyed most.

The first picnic was a dress rehearsal: my girlfriend invited her friends so I could practice the setup and they could post pictures. Then came flyers, a Google Business profile, and Google ads, which brought the first real booking, an anniversary. I wrote the couple a card and left them a succulent.

Bookings kept coming through the Google profile all summer. Near the end of it, a DM asked whether I could set up for twenty people. With one table there was no way, so I quoted a price that would have funded three or four more tables. They passed, but it planted the idea that bigger groups were where the economics worked.

The business ended the summer around break-even. A few weeks into my sophomore year, I got a call from a mom in Miami booking a birthday picnic for her daughter. The week leading up to it was a stream of texts and calls over every small detail, which showed me how demanding service work can be. The picnic went great, she referred her friends, and that referral led to my first two picnics in one day.

Season two opened during finals week, in the rain. A last-minute move under a gazebo at Gallup Park saved the couple's date. After school ended I built a second table and expanded the inventory for larger groups, then mostly let the Google profile carry bookings: I was working a full-time internship at Ally in Detroit and starting Stir at the same time, and Yoel was doing research full-time at Michigan.

In mid-June I got a text from an unknown number: a producer asking whether Lux Picnics wanted to be featured on a Local 4 "Live in the D" segment. I assumed it was a scam until I looked into it. The taping fell on a day I had a meeting I couldn't move, so Yoel went on instead. He was nervous, and we spent the whole afternoon before the show rehearsing lines. The segment went well, and I watched it live from home.

A few weeks later we set up our biggest picnic yet: nine people for a bachelorette party, with both tables out for the first time.

We wound the business down when I moved to San Francisco. I still have the tables.