Over the past year, you may have noticed a totem floating amongst the crowd at festivals with a Wilson volleyball on top. Besides the comedic cries for Wilson and getting a great picture, there is more behind him than meets the eye. Where’s Wilson is an advocacy group that travels to festivals, hoping to spread their support and message of anxiety and depression awareness. What started out as a totem for their small rave family, Wilson grew to be a prominent figure for the mission they decided to take on. Just like in the movie where Wilson is always there to give a sense of comfort to Tom Hanks in the film Castaway, that is what Wilson represented to them. A totem to look for, always in the crowd nearby, with a welcoming group to provide support and love to those who need it, dancing beneath him.
RaverRafting had the chance to sit down with the Atlanta based group to learn more about who they are and what they aim to achieve.
For those that don’t know, how did Where’s Wilson get started?
Originally it was two of us, me and my buddy Adam Wilson. We went to TomorrowWorld together and we really enjoyed it. Then we went to Sunset Music Festival with a couple more friends and somewhere among that festival we needed to come up with a totem because there’s too many of us now. It was a pretty small group at the time, though, about four to ten people. Wilson kept getting lost evidently. You’d turn around and he’d be gone and two hours later he’d show back up with armfuls of chicken fingers and beer. So that was when the idea was born.
By Imagine festival that following summer of last year, we decided to make the totem. Imagine festival was the first place where we unveiled him and immediately we knew it was going to be a huge hit. Everyone was wandering around the festival and just yelling “WIIILSON!” People kept coming up to take a picture of him and just laughing at it. And then we saw it made it onto Channel 2 News. They had a picture of Where’s Wilson just floating through, and a zoomed in headshot of his head just going through a crowd. A few weeks after that, I had this epiphany if something like this can garner this much energy and power out of people, then we should use it to do something good, to do something positive with it.
In the festival industry, there’s just not a lot of that going around. People want to go and they want to indulge in whatever lifestyle or activities they want to do. And that’s completely fine, that’s what they’re for, you can do whatever you want. We figured we could use it to do something positive. Naturally I made the connection between Wilson and Tom Hanks because Wilson was there for him through thick and thin. He was there as a symbol for him despite all the tough times that he had, which I think speaks out to a lot of people that go into the festival industry that are kind of looking for that. They’re looking for friendships or looking to meet new people. It’s really the only event like that I’ve ever seen where there’s just mass amounts of people that go by themselves and they’ll post on Facebook groups and they go “Hey, I’m going by myself and looking for some friends to hang out with.” It’s fascinating to see because, you know, people don’t go to Falcons games by themselves or things like that. It’s kind of different.
We kind of understand that that’s what people are looking for. People want those friendships and that meaning in their life. A lot of times people will tend to become over anxious, let anxiety get the best of them. So somewhere, I guess I made that connection that we could use it to raise awareness for anxiety and depression. People that don’t have their own Wilson. Somebody they can turn to and kick out the cave whenever things are going bad, he’s still there floating nearby.
By EDC Orlando, we decided to get snapchat filters made. We designed some snapchat filters and use them at EDC. We launched them over the entire festival grounds and they were used and viewed over 130,000 times in the course of two days. That’s when we really realized, okay we got a pretty good idea here. It’s picking up traction and now we know how to market it effectively where it could do some good and do what we want to do, raise awareness.
So how did you and the rest of the members of Where’s Wilson come together and create the group that it is now?
It was just natural, it’s one of those things that just happens. Me and Wilson, we had made friends. Me and my girlfriend had met Lauren and Doug about a year ago. We went to Sunset together, to Veld in Toronto, and then Imagine. Our squad just became bigger and bigger. It’s about 50/50 of people that we knew each other from college and people we didn’t. When we went to Sunset Music Festival, there were small groups of us from college that we met up with and began to hang out. By the time Imagine came around, we had created a multiple GroupMe’s and then it started to blossom. We started to merge together, people started going to shows together and whatever that dynamic was, it somehow just kind of happened.
We joke around all the time about putting people through an initiation process but we don’t do anything like that of course. Next thing you know, there’s 60 people in our group going to shows and festivals all the time. Imagine is definitely our largest, being our home base. Usually our festivals on the road, we have about 20-25 that venture together. There will be around 19 or 20 for Moonrise this weekend. It just kind of happened over time. It was strange, people like the idea of it and I think it’s something within the human spirit to want to help people. There’s a lot of bad people out in the world, but there’s a lot of great people too. I think it’s just in the human DNA to want to love people and help people. It makes you happy and everyone wants to be happy. Nobody wants to be sad. Whenever people got what we were trying to do and the mission of it, it gives people something to build towards or work for. Something to put hope in.
From what we can tell off of Facebook and your website, Where’s Wilson has been official for almost a year now. What has the experience been to create a supportive group and foundation for people to reach out to?
We waited to form the company this year for registration purposes. It’s been challenging and very, very rewarding. We don’t want to cross a line and this is a topic that’s come up, especially between the handful of us that are very active, to the point where we don’t want people to think we’re certified counselors or therapists. We have to be very clear and say we can’t help you but we will still love you as a person and help you get the help that you need.
Right now we’re looking for a specific partner in Atlanta area that we can work with and be able to financially support them and have an agreement that we can recommend their clinic for a place to go to, so to speak. We can send somebody there and, if need be, help pay for their treatment. Or just help support that place financially, through whatever means that may look like. We’re in due diligence process right now, looking at several places in Atlanta. We’ve had people helping us gather info and selecting the best one where we feel like we can make a real impact for somebody that needs it.
We understand that nobody on this Earth is perfect. If anyone tries to be perfect in life, number one you’re going to fail and beat yourself up pretty hard. The key is to forgive yourself and other people and just love other people. We just don’t want to go through our lives and look back and not have even tried because we couldn’t be perfect. We’d rather try and fall short but at least have gotten somewhere and helped somebody, even if it’s just one person. We could make some type of impact.
How did the bracelet come to fruition with Electric Family? How has it affected the reach of your organization and what has been the reception from everyone?
My girlfriend said, let’s hit up somebody like Electric Family and see if they’ll make bracelets for us to sell. I was all about it, because I don’t really like the idea of raising awareness. Whenever you google “awareness” or what it means to raise awareness, one of the first things that pops up is from the dictionary and it said something hysterical like, “appearing to do something when in reality doing nothing”. We definitely don’t want to be perceived as people that are just like, “Hey you know should know about anxiety and depression,” and then just walk off.
We convinced Electric Family to make bracelets for us so we could turn around and sell them. Then we’d donate all the money to organizations that research anxiety and depression. That’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve sold a couple thousand dollars worth of them now. The only expenses that we have are marketing and Snapchat filters. All of our Facebook marketing is free. Nobody actually makes any money off of it, nobody gets paid or gets a sales commission. Right now we’re just saving up money in our bank account and we’re going to make a donation at the end of the year.
That’s where we’re at right now. We just reordered 300 more bracelets from Electric Family. They have also agreed to help us make a graphic design for a T-shirt and manufacture that as well. We’re hoping to make some flags also and get them out by next year. We see people pop all over the country and tagging us on Facebook saying they love what we’re doing and our mission and how we’re trying to help people.
It’s reached pretty far. To give an example, this first real order we got from our website, was a person in Hawaii which was pretty crazy. Nobody saw it coming. From there, we got orders from Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, all over the place. The biggest mechanism for us besides referring people to the website to buy them, is just going to festivals and using the Snapchat filter. It’s a creative way for people to see it and then it puts the question in their mind of, “Who is this?” I can’t count the amount of times with people coming up to us saying, “Do you know you have your own filter?” Then they ask questions of what it’s for and why is it there. It opens the door to show them who we are and what we’re trying to do.
We have been beyond grateful to Electric Family for helping us do this and accomplish this. They didn’t have to, their company with that size and magnitude didn’t have to do that but it’s awesome that they do it because they don’t have to. And because we have partnered with a name like that, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We would’ve been trying to make kandi bracelets and sell them for a dollar but you can have a great idea and have missing pieces of the puzzle and only make it so far. They were a huge piece of the puzzle and hopefully they continue to be a huge piece. I’m excited to do this graphic design for the T-shirt. We’re looking forward to it.
JOYRDE rocking the bracelet at his show at Opera in Atlanta
How did the ticket giveaways for festivals start to come about for your group?
So, I own a restaurant and a very effective form of marketing is giving away free stuff. Obviously, people love free food so I’ve done some Facebook contests giving away free food, where someone will win free sandwiches for a year. You can get a user reach base of 40,000 people and just get the word out. Every Thursday morning, we have a meeting to go over this and we love to brainstorm and figure out what are our goals and what do we want to do. How are we going to get there.
We want to help people and we want to give back but unless we’re doing something to generate revenue then we can’t give back. So it’s based around a business model. We’ve gotten a pretty good grip on making money to give back financially, but now we need to give back using our time for community service for some of these organizations we can partner with. Being able to figure out how to run a business successfully, a key part of what we do is followers and the user base. So putting two and two together, this would be a great thing to do is give away festival tickets.
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship where we get to advertise for them across the country. It takes a lot of footwork but after we came up with that idea, we were looking for what festival was coming up next. We saw a music festival coming up in Birmingham and then Moonrise in Baltimore. So we shot out an email and a day later we got a response back from Moonrise, saying that it was a pretty cool idea and they’re all for it. Sloss, the festival in Birmingham, had said it was too late, they were a week out but would love to revisit the idea for next year.
We had to make it very specific with the details, with how long, how we select the winners, things like that. We told Moonrise, we didn’t want to receive any of the tickets, they can hang on to them and mail it themselves. So that’s what we did and it worked out fantastic. It reached over 130,000 people on Facebook. It got a lot of attention and when we saw the impact it was making, we knew it was working. We gotta keep getting our name and our mission out there. We make sure the first sentence is that we’re raising awareness about anxiety and depression, check out our page.
Imagine was the next obvious choice. It’s coming up and it’s our hometown. It was difficult to get in touch but we had a member that knew the festival owner personally. She reached out and he loved it and wanted to help. That fell in line and we’ve reached out to a couple more and they seem interested. So hopefully we will have two to three more this year or in the Spring, at least.
How many festivals has the totem reached so far?
Imagine was his first. EDC Orlando, Okeechobee, Shaky Beats. After Shaky Beats is when our demand grew and we wanted to reach more people at the same time. So we created a second Wilson and sent it to one of our guys in Ohio. Couple people went to Spring Awakening and on the same weekend, Bonnaroo was going on. So a smaller group took Wilson 1 to Bonnaroo and the other group took Wilson 2 to Spring Awakening. So technically, after that it split. So Spring Awakening, Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, Sloss and Moonrise coming up this weekend will make it 9. He’s been to a handful of small shows that allow totems as well.
Do you think you’ll ever expand past two Wilsons and maybe outside the U.S.?
Yeah, absolutely. We have a goal that there’s no sense in stopping within America if you can take an idea overseas. There are some gray areas, because you’re giving up a lot of control with that but at the same time we aren’t really looking for control. We’re looking to raise awareness and it goes back to that original principal. You got to understand that not everyone is perfect and some people are going to do certain things sometimes. I’m sure Nike would love for professional athletes to not get arrested in their stuff but at the end of the day it’s not a reflection of you. You got to understand that if somebody else does something, that’s their own free will. You can’t control them to begin with, so why try.
At Electric Forest, a couple members of our group said there were multiple Wilson’s floating around. It’s definitely becoming more popular. Some of the people have reached out to us and asked to partner with us and some people never have heard of us. Some people know who we are and some that don’t. Some people just use Wilson because it’s a good totem, it’s pretty funny realistically.
As our squad grows and get bigger, I’m sure that the idea would go further. You can only be in so many places at one time, but if you could have six Wilsons floating around the U.S., I don’t know if we could financially afford the marketing for all of it. But we would at least have the idea out there and people would see it and help us grow.
We’ve seen Wilson go through a couple of transformations so far. Will there be more changes to him? Will there start to be more than on Wilson to cover more festivals?
We do change the totem very sparingly. There have been maybe 50 ideas thrown out and a lot of them don’t ever make the cut because it is our brand, our logo. You got to protect it and can’t make too many changes to it. The glow sticks in his hair was from day one and will always be there. Shortly after Shaky Beats, we realized he needed to be more well lit, you can’t really see him at night. So that was when one of our guys, Chris, came up with the idea of EL wire. We mapped it around his face with a hot glue gun and now he has a battery pack in his head. Now when you turn it on, he starts blinking.
He does have a new pole so that he can get much higher up. He was just six feet at first. We’re also looking to get an LED pole that lights up. It would basically be a blinking neon sign, you couldn’t miss it from anywhere. We definitely don’t like to mess with him too much.
Do you think Wilson will visit other festivals or events outside of the EDM community?
Yes we would like to. Eventually, we want to transition outside of the music festival industry so people all around the country know who he is and what we’re trying to do. That would just be a story of where he came from. We can’t limit ourselves to one type of industry and one type of culture. We do have to, so to speak, build a great foundation for him here. Then we will slowly begin to leave and raise awareness to people that aren’t in the industry and know nothing about it. It can be really difficult if you try to do that right out of the gate, like knowing what a totem is and trying to help them understand. But the story will began to transition, we have several of our members that sell our bracelets to people that don’t have anything to do with our industry.
Just the other day, one of our girls that is a waitress was wearing the bracelet and her table asked her what it was. She told them our mission and what it means. It’s a way to get it out there and see it for themselves. It’s a really great glimpse into our culture for people that don’t have anything to do with it. There are so many people out there that don’t know it exists, they’re like, “What is EDM? What are raves or music festivals?”. There’s a large group of people, right in our backyard, that have no idea what electronic music is or what music festivals really are. They’ve never seen one, they don’t understand it, and they have no desire to go to one. And that’s okay, but there’s a big market out there for our mission to grow as a business to help people.
What has been the most memorable experiences during festival meetups?
I would say the most memorable would be the first time we used him at Imagine. We were walking with him in the tunnels with the crowd at the raceway and somebody yelled “Wilson!”. It just echoed in there and all of a sudden, 100 people were just yelling Wilson. That’s something that gives you goose bumps and we just look around to all of our friends laughing and smiling. Then you pop out of the tunnel and you see a Ferris wheel, and then you look over to the main stage and just people dancing and laughing. It was one of those surreal moments where it’s like you just really love being there, surrounded by your friends, and people that love you.
That was the first moment that hooked me and a lot of my friends. Another one I remember specifically was when it was raining at EDC Orlando while Above and Beyond was playing. I remember the lasers were dancing through the lights and it looked like glitter just falling everywhere. And you look around and all your friends are dancing and laughing, jumping in the rain. Everybody looks so happy.
My personal favorite though is when you’re just standing in the crowd, looking around, and then you see this one person trying to take a picture. They’re so focused and try to zoom in on him. Then they look down and see you seeing them and you both start laughing.
Have you had a lot of people that have come up to you that you knew you from online or came to talk to about what you do?
It’s a little bit of both. Sometimes people don’t even run up to you to tell you or anything like that. At Sloss Music Festival, I was standing in the crowd watching Odesza. A guy came up and we asked each other where we were from and he had said I know you’re from Atlanta. I asked how he knew and he said I know who you guys are and what you do. It was cool that he just casually knew who we were and what we were wanting to do with our mission. That was one of those moments where it’s kind of like well we might not be doing much, but we’re doing something. We’re making some kind of progress out there with people. Putting it in front of people’s minds that it is an issue. When you got people like Linkin Park’s lead singer is committing suicide and it happens, then a couple days later people kind of forget about it. Then a couple months later it happens again, and it keeps reoccurring.
Are there future events such as fundraisers or group get togethers besides festivals in the works for this year?
Right now we’re focused on two or three main goals. The first is focusing on one partner in Atlanta that we can financially support and help refer people to them and pay for treatment. We’re not too sure how that is going to look like, but we want to make a long and prosperous relationship with the right people. How can we give our time outside of finances to help grow the organization and the community. There are groups out there like that they do stuff like that, like for children groups and those that visit hospitals.
Another goal is to develop a second product, a T-shirt. We want to raise more questions and gain more awareness. We try to stay away from fundraising. We did do a round of funding from everyone in our group to get the bracelets out there. We’ve talked a tax advisor and we have to donate an x amount of money at the end of the year and after that we have x amount left over to pay taxes. Whatever money we make on top of sales for the bracelets and the shirts, it will go right back into marketing or make a donation.
What attracts you specifically to the community and festivals in the EDM culture?
I think it attracts anybody that has ever gone to a festival for the first time. The reason why, I’ve read some articles in psychology behind electronic music festivals and why people love them, it has a lot to do with the uniqueness and genuineness of the festival or event. Whenever you wander into an electronic music festival, chances are you’ve never seen anything like it before. You have no idea what it is and what is going to happen, the things you’re gonna see and the experience you’re going to have. It’s overwhelming for the mass majority of people. I know it was for me. I went to go work at a counter point festival and it wasn’t the same level of production like EDC or TomorrowWorld but I was still blown away. I was amazed that places like this exist and it’s so entertaining. But on top of the production, the lasers, the sound and the cool people in costumes, are the people behind it and who you meet along the way.
They’re glorious, beautiful people. They love you, they have no reason to be mad or angry at you for whatever reason. They’re there for the same reason as you; they want to have a great time, meet new people, and enjoy life. I think that’s what really draws people in. You get the mass amount of production upfront, nothing like you’ve ever seen or experienced before and then you have that combination of the people. It reassures you that there are good people are out there in the world. It’s not all what the news perpetuates, it’s not all bad. It’s not all terroristic attacks, and people killing each other or suing each other. It’s not all companies poisoning Americans with products. It’s not all doom and gloom. There are people out there just like you that are nice, genuine loving people that just want to have fun and have a good time. I think that’s what draws everybody in, that’s what drew me in.
Is there anything else you want to tell Where’s Wilson fans?
I guess the only thing I would say to people is that there are going to be bad people out there that try to ruin your day or your idea, what you’re trying to do. You can’t let them slow you down. You just got to forgive yourself sometimes, other people all the time and keep moving. Even when you don’t have all the answers, you just keep moving and hope, have faith that the answers are going to come and be introduced to the right people at the right time to bring about the most good in your life and that other person’s life.
We would like to thank the group for meeting to us give more insight into their mission. You can check out their website below and can purchase their bracelets here. Be sure to keep your eye out for Wilson in the crowds for festivals coming up this season. They have their future festivals listed on their website. If you want to enter for your chance to win tickets to Imagine Music Festival this year, the giveaway is still open until September 7th at 5 p.m. Don’t be afraid to stop and say hi. They’ll be waiting with open arms.
Connect with Where’s Wilson:
https://www.whereswilson.net/
https://www.facebook.com/WilsonTotem/
https://twitter.com/WilsonTotem
https://www.instagram.com/wilsontotem/
Connect with Electric Family:
https://www.electricfamily.com/
https://www.electricfamily.com/blogs/
https://www.facebook.com/ElectricFam/
https://twitter.com/ElectricFamily
https://www.instagram.com/electricfamily/
Share On
![JVNA Talks New Album, Experimenting with New Genres, Upcoming Tour and More [Exclusive Interview]](https://whiteraverraft.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/260721004_2000950413404951_7485189360153767787_n.jpg)
