👋 Hey, I'm Casandra! I share really good business ideas anyone can start, backed by research and supported with playbooks. Subscribe for detailed breakdowns and actionable advice you won't find anywhere else.
Anyone who's spent a day at the beach knows how much of a schlep it can be. Chairs, umbrellas, tents, towels, coolers, snacks, sunscreen, boogie boards. There's a lot of stuff you might need to set yourself up comfortably in the sun all day!
Now if you live at the beach like I do, you'll probably own a lot of this gear. Given the amount of time I spend there, it makes sense for me to have a lot of things that make the day more comfortable and fun, including a beach wagon to lug it all around!
But if you only go a few times a summer, you're coming on public transit, or you're hosting an event that calls for more gear than you own, the schlep stops making sense.
Over the last few years, savvy entrepreneurs have started taking note, and developing done-for-you solutions that take care of all the lugging, setup, and teardown for beach and beyond.
In Rockaway Beach, a company called Cabana Boy will set up a tent, chairs, a cooler full of cold drinks, and even beach games like Spikeball before you arrive.
In Montauk, Bontauk will build you a legal beach bonfire and return at the end of the night to make sure it’s safely put out and properly cleaned up.
In NYC, Perfect Picnic’s signature Central Park picnic runs $2,800 for two, and the crew will have the linens, real glassware, fresh flowers, and a custom menu styled on the grass waiting for you.
In Scottsdale, Valley Christmas Lights will deck out your whole house for the holidays, then come back in January to take every strand back down.
In every example, the customer is buying the same two things: access to the equipment, and the behind-the-scenes logistics. A cabana appears as if a fairy godmother arranged it, and by midnight it's gone. I call it the setup-and-teardown economy.
Table of Contents
What Is the Setup-and-Teardown Economy?
The setup-and-teardown economy is the growing category of service businesses that deliver a fully built physical experience, then remove every trace of it once the customer is done. Operators handle the hauling, the assembly, the local permits, and the cleanup for beach days, bonfires, luxury picnics, sleepover tent parties, holiday light displays, and more.
Setup-and-teardown operators are part of the broader party rental industry, which is projected to more than double, from $19.2 billion in 2025 to $50.6 billion by 2034.
On paper, the category sounds like equipment rental, but spend a few minutes on any of these companies' booking pages, and the difference becomes obvious. A rental company rents you gear and leaves the rest to you. Setup-and-teardown companies sell the whole done-for-you experience.
Getting stuff down to the beach sucks. You lose half the fun before you even start.
Samuel Ancona ran enterprise sales at IBM before founding Santa Monica Picnic Co in 2020. As he puts it, "Getting stuff down to the beach sucks. You lose half the fun before you even start."
Why Is the Setup-and-Teardown Economy Booming Now?
Setup-and-teardown businesses are part of a bigger shift I wrote about earlier this year. Screen fatigue has hit a breaking point and people are reclaiming their time and attention through intentional offline experiences. While people crave physical experiences like a birthday party at the beach, or a game day in the park, they don’t crave all the setup and logistics required to make those days special. Paying someone to remove the friction is the fastest way to be offline and fully present.
The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for this shift. In many places, outdoor gatherings were the only kind allowed in 2020, and the operators who already existed got swamped. One San Diego picnic company grew more than tenfold in a few months.
When doing this research, I expected to see this trend deflate once life went back to normal but the search data says otherwise. Take the keyword "luxury picnic." It averaged 113 US searches a month before 2020 and peaked at 5,808 in May 2021, a 50x spike. But that spike never fully receded, and the term has since settled between 1,450 and 2,700 monthly searches, which is 15–20x its old baseline!1
This category is also quite AI-proof because an LLM can’t carry a cooler across hot sand or dig a legal fire pit. The work that makes these businesses valuable happens in the physical world.
Who Pays for Setup-and-Teardown Services?
88% of consumers say they prioritize experiences over material things,2 but millennials and Gen Z are the likeliest customers for setup-and-teardown services because they spend the most on those experiences and post about the ones they attend. 79% of 18-to-35-year-olds plan to attend more live events this year,3 and 74% say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. Millennials rent much of what previous generations owned,4 from apartments to handbags, and Gen Z leans hardest into experiences, with 86% admitting they overspend on live events, often because of FOMO.5 For customers who plan to post on social media, the setup is a crucial part of the experience. A professionally styled picnic photographs a lot better than a beach towel and a bag of chips, and unless you’re particularly talented, neighbors are much more likely to photograph a professional Christmas light display than your DIY lights.
How Big Is the Setup-and-Teardown Business Opportunity?
Santa Monica Picnic Co. has staged more than 1,500 picnics since 2020, runs a summer team of seven or eight, and is planning beach clubs ahead of the 2028 Olympics.6
One market research firm now sizes the luxury picnic segment alone at $1.8 billion in 2025, headed to $4.1 billion by 2034, with average spend per event rising from $350 to $620 between 2021 and 2025.7
The same report puts corporate bookings at 3.2x the value of consumer ones. "Company picnic planner" gets 500 searches a month at zero keyword difficulty,8 so corporate customers are also looking for this service and almost no one is competing for them.
Picnics are only one example. “Christmas light installation” gets 21K US monthly searches. Its November 2025 volume hit an all-time high, and summer 2025 volume was 4–5X that of previous summers.
How Much Money Do Setup-and-Teardown Businesses Make? (With Real Examples)
Setup-and-teardown businesses scale from seasonal side gig to full company: One Christmas light installer on Reddit reported earning $16K profit in a single two-month season,9 while the biggest light installation company I found grosses more than $800K per season.10 The difference between those two results is scale, since the biggest operators run multiple crews and fit far more jobs into the same season.
Luxury picnics: Up to $15K a month for top founders,11 on events billing $20012 to $2,800.13
Bonfires: $18914 to $1,30015 per fire depending on the market and package.
Beach setups: $70–750 per booking.16
Sleepover parties and backyard movies: $250–72517 and $449+18 per party.
Holiday lights: $35K in one company’s first season, growing to $800K+ per season within three years.19
And believe it or not, startup costs don’t need to be high. One picnic founder started with just $300.20
Let’s let at each one in more detail before I share my step-by-step guide to starting a setup-and-teardown business.