Playground by Zalando: the arrival lottery that regulates a high-demand event and its brand activations

On the 27th and 28th of June 2026, Zalando turned Paris into the playing field for Playground: two days of sport, fashion and culture bringing a community together around the brand and its partners. As Europe's leading online fashion player, Zalando wanted an immersive, free experience. But free doesn't mean rule-free: with no ticket price to filter demand, that demand far exceeded the venue's capacity. Socialclub relied on Billy to run the entire digital experience, from pre-registration through to on-site access to the activations, with all the rigour of paid ticketing.

The brief

Run a free, high-demand event with the discipline of a paid one.

In practice, four challenges:

• Manage a pre-registration flow with multiple rules: age verification, consents and constraints on basket contents.
• Regulate access to 12 brand experiences without a price to arbitrate demand, while keeping every activation in the spotlight.
• Drive down no-shows, the number one risk for a free, multi-slot event.
• Communicate effectively before, during and after the event, across very different audiences (children, teenagers, adults, VIPs), all in white label.

What Billy put in place

1) An arrival lottery to regulate workshops in real time

The heart of the setup. Rather than opening all registrations at once, Billy triggered the lottery at the moment each attendee arrived on site: once their ticket was scanned, they could sign up for the sessions available within a two-hour window around their arrival. As a result, the 160 sessions filled up progressively throughout the day, every activation stayed visible, and someone arriving in the late afternoon could still access experiences.

2) A registration funnel driven by business rules

Three consents were built directly into the booking step: age confirmation (18+, mandatory), acceptance of the terms and conditions (mandatory) and an opt-in for post-event emails (optional). Basket contents were constrained by business rules, a single category per order, to keep every registration within a clear framework. No third-party form, no redirect.

3) Real-time managed overbooking and 11 orchestrated reminder campaigns

At a free event, no-shows are the number one risk. Billy combined controlled overbooking with a sequence of 11 automated campaigns, segmented by order profile: adult groups, solo adults and multi-slot ticket holders, with a debrief at the end of day one for those registered for day two, and a final reminder on the closing day. By analysing no-shows from the first time slots and the first day, Billy adjusted the overbooking to get as close as possible to the venue's capacity, without ever exceeding it.

4) A dedicated domain: zalando-playground.com

Billy configured and hosted the entire ticketing experience on a dedicated domain, zalando-playground.com, with the .fr, .de, .eu and .org extensions all redirected to a single entry point. Attendees never left the Zalando universe, from registration through to scanning and the on-site lottery.

5) Real-time dashboards and post-event analysis

Operational dashboards provided hour-by-hour tracking of entries, no-show rates and attendance peaks, making it possible to steer the day live. After the event, Billy delivered a detailed analysis of bookings versus actual attendance and of attendee profiles, in the form of a standalone dashboard.

The impact

Across two days, Billy processed more than 4,500 registrations, issued over 10,500 tickets and regulated 160 workshop sessions by lottery, with 100% of sessions filled in a fully branded environment. Above all, the combination of managed overbooking and 11 targeted reminder campaigns took venue fill rate from 55% to 80% — cutting no-shows from 45% to 20%. Billy turned a complex, free, compliance-heavy setup into a seamless registration experience, and proved that a free event demands exactly the same operational rigour as a paid one.

Billy enables brands, producers and organisers to take back control of their ticketing and build advanced event experiences. Get in touch to find out more!