Billetto Brand Guidelines: A 2009 Copenhagen Ticket Marketplace for Going Out More

A Copenhagen marketplace with one mission.

Billetto is a self-service ticketing platform and event marketplace based in Copenhagen. The company says it was founded in 2009 and has kept the same mission ever since: “to get people to go out more.” Its press newsroom names Patrick Borre as its founding chief executive, and a company announcement of June 2023 described him as having co-founded Billetto in 2009; he still leads it as chief executive, according to its leadership page. The same announcement referred to “the initial co-founders” without naming the others.

The mission doubles as a slogan. On its website Billetto uses the hashtag #GoOutMore and says it wants to spotlight independent “subculture” experiences, especially across Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, while picking out cultural events from the rest of Europe. It gives its own examples: Japanese design festivals, drag shows, techno nights and comedy festivals. It says it measures that aim by the number of new attendees it brings to small independent events.

The company frames this in values as much as in commerce. Its mission page sets out three ideas: humanism, which it defines as empathy in human relationships; art, which it says provokes and inspires change; and education, which it calls “the ticket to the future.” The tone throughout is informal, with emoji headings and short lines such as “Pick. Pay. Party.” for the buying process.

Its British arm has its own dated record. Companies House, the UK register, lists Billetto UK Limited, with a London address, as incorporated on 17 January 2013, four years after the date the company gives for its founding in Denmark.

Two sides of one platform.

Billetto describes itself as two things at once. For organisers it is a self-service platform to sell, promote, advertise and manage tickets and memberships, with tools for check-in, finance, attendees and team access listed on its website. A feature it calls Billetto Advertising is presented as a single button: the company says it then creates the ads and recommendations an event needs automatically. It also offers an API and webhooks for developers.

For ticket buyers it is a community and marketplace. The company says the community has grown to more than 6 million members; an older boilerplate on its press site, from 2020 and 2021, gave more than 3 million. Buyers can follow organisers, save and share events, and check in with a mobile wallet; the company stresses local payment methods, paperless tickets and short forms. It compares its discovery side to a streaming service for events.

The platform is organised by country. Billetto’s global home page offers 14 country sites: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Portugal. Its press boilerplate gives the same number of European markets, and the UK site lists city pages for places such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol.

Sport is part of the mix. In March 2021 Billetto announced a subscription season pass for the Danish football club Brøndby IF, which it said had used Billetto for ticketing since 2016; the feature let fans pay for membership monthly or yearly and renew automatically. In August 2020 it released a tool to sync paid events with Facebook Events, according to its newsroom.

The company’s offices are in central Copenhagen, with a second office in Malaga, Spain, according to its careers page, which also says more than 60 per cent of the team is international.

Ticketing and event platforms.

Ticketing and event platforms sit between the people who put on events and the people who go to them, and their design has to serve both sides at once. Some are primary agents that sell on behalf of promoters, venues and festivals; others run resale marketplaces where fans and traders list tickets they already hold. Each kind presents itself differently, and each is worth reading on its own terms rather than as a single category.

The interface is where most of the brand lives. Event pages, seat maps, ticket wallets and checkout screens carry the name more often than any advertisement does, and the companies publish these flows in their own apps and help pages. In the United Kingdom, a 2018 court order secured by the Competition and Markets Authority required one resale site to show seat details, face value and the identity of the seller, so for resale brands some page elements are set by regulators as well as by designers.

Around the interface sit the smaller marks: app icons, short wordmarks and the photography used on event listings. Much of that photography belongs to artists, promoters and venues rather than to the platform, which means the platform’s own colours and type often act as a frame around other people’s posters, line-ups and stage shots.

Corporate pages tell a further story about owners and markets. Ticketing brands are often bought and sold, merged into larger live-entertainment groups or kept as separate names inside one company, and their about pages, trade-press announcements and regulator filings are the plainest record of who owns what, and where each name trades. The guides in this group read those records alongside each brand’s public identity; every palette shown is our own unofficial interpretation.

A management buy-out and a simple logo kit.

Billetto changed hands in 2023. In a release dated 7 June 2023, the company announced that Ballroom ApS, a holding company led by Billetto’s management including Patrick Borre, had acquired all of the debt and equity in Billetto ApS from the Danish Export and Investment Fund (EIFO) and a group of angel investors. The release named the Swedish Öhman Group, the Stockholm-listed investor VNV Global, the investment company MC-Group and Billetto’s chairman as co-investors alongside management, and said Borre would continue to lead the business.

The same release described the platform as serving more than 50,000 different events across 14 countries in Europe, and said Billetto had helped more than 100,000 event organisers; Borre thanked EIFO for its support over the previous ten years. These figures are the company’s own.

Billetto’s press kit is the clearest statement of its visual system. Its brand-assets page, dated May 2020, says the Billetto logo comes in two options and two colours, a light and a dark version, and that a square logo is used inside the app, as an icon and as a template for the background of promotional material. The kit also offers styled app screenshots of event pages and ticket previews. The colours themselves are not named there, so this guide uses tones of its own.

The website groups its organiser features under three verbs, sell, promote and manage, and its focus on smaller events is stated in the 2023 release too: Borre described the “long tail” of the event business, organisers selling fewer than 250,000 tickets a year, as the market Billetto serves.

For a design guide, Billetto shows how a ticketing brand can carry one simple instruction, go out more, through its slogan, its tone and its product names. Compare Eventbrite and TicketSource, two other ticketing platforms built for organisers. For this guide we use a deep teal, a mint wash and a coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Billetto’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.