Expert opinion · July 2, 2026 · Nikita Khandheria
By Nikita Khandheria, Founder & CEO, ERIA
When people hear that I own an events company, they usually assume I spend my days thinking about flowers, table settings, and menus. While those details certainly matter, they are almost never where my attention starts. Long before I think about what a room should look like, I am thinking about why the event exists in the first place.
That question sounds obvious, but I have found that it is surprisingly rare. Over the last several years, I have spoken with hundreds of companies and couples planning events, and many of them begin the conversation by telling me how many guests they expect or what kind of food they want to serve. Those are important logistical decisions, but they are not strategic ones. Before any of that matters, I want to understand what they hope people will remember six months after the event is over.
The answer to that question changes everything.
A company celebrating the close of a record-breaking year is trying to accomplish something very different from a company hosting prospective clients for the first time. A wedding celebrating two families joining together requires a different approach than a wedding where the couple simply wants everyone to have the best party of their lives. Even though both events might look similar on paper, they should feel completely different to the people attending them.
That distinction is one of the reasons I believe the events industry often focuses on the wrong metrics. We have become very good at measuring attendance, food costs, bar sales, and timelines because those are easy numbers to quantify. We spend far less time measuring whether an event actually accomplished what it set out to do.
If a company spends $100,000 bringing together its employees but nobody leaves feeling more connected to the organization, was it successful? If a product launch generates beautiful photographs but none of those images clearly communicate whose product was being launched, was the event truly working as a marketing investment? If a wedding looks beautiful but the couple spends the entire evening worrying about logistics instead of enjoying themselves, did the planning process actually succeed?
Those questions interest me far more than whether the linens matched the flowers.
One of the biggest changes I have noticed over the past few years is that events have quietly become one of the most valuable forms of content creation that companies invest in. Twenty years ago, an event ended when the last guest went home. Today, that same event continues to exist through hundreds of photographs, dozens of LinkedIn posts, Instagram Stories, recap videos, press coverage, recruiting campaigns, and company newsletters. In many cases, the event itself lasts four hours while the content it produces continues creating value for an entire year.
That reality has fundamentally changed how we design events at ERIA.
When our team walks through a venue before guests arrive, we are not simply asking whether the room looks beautiful. We are asking where people will naturally stop to take photographs. We are asking whether the company's branding will still be recognizable when those photographs appear on social media six months later. We are asking how the room will feel from every angle because we know that every guest is carrying a camera in their pocket.
People often tell me that branding is becoming more important at events. I actually think the opposite is true. Branding has always been important; we are simply paying closer attention to it now because everyone has become a publisher. Every guest has the ability to create content that reaches thousands of people, which means every event has become part hospitality experience and part marketing strategy.
That is why flexibility matters so much when choosing a venue. Some spaces are beautiful, but they were never designed to become an extension of someone else's brand. At ERIA, we intentionally built our venues to transform. One week, our waterfront space might host an executive retreat with understated branding and quiet elegance. The following week, the exact same room might become a fully immersive product launch with custom window installations, projection mapping, branded cocktails, interactive demonstrations, and lighting designed around a company's visual identity. The architecture remains the same, but the experience becomes entirely different.
I believe that is where the industry is heading. The most successful venues will no longer be defined by their furniture or square footage. They will be defined by how completely they can become a reflection of the people using them.
When I founded ERIA, I wasn't trying to build another event venue. There are already thousands of beautiful venues across California. I wanted to build a company that approached events differently. I wanted us to ask better questions, solve bigger problems, and create experiences that people continued talking about long after the room had been reset for the next event.
That philosophy still guides every project we take on. Whether we are planning a proposal for two people or a corporate event for hundreds, our goal is exactly the same. We want every decision we make to contribute to a larger story, because long after the flowers have been cleared away and the music has stopped playing, stories are the only thing people actually take home with them.
