Merch for Mexican producers at the Grec Festival Barcelona

Merch program for Mexican producers at the Grec Festival

Format

Multidisciplinary performing arts festival with summer programming in Barcelona

Main venue

Teatre Grec and other venues in Parc de Montjuïc and across Barcelona

Use case

Stand merch, dressing-room gifts, European programmer kits, VIP boxes for cultural accounts

Working languages

We produce in Spanish, Catalan, and English; we deliver inside the European Union

The Grec is the annual performing arts event in Barcelona and one of the reference festivals of the European summer calendar. For an invited Mexican company, the festival functions as three simultaneous events: a window for European and Latin American programmers making tour decisions for the following season, a date with the Spanish and Catalan cultural press evaluating the artistic work and the brand presence, and a meeting point for distributors and booking agents serving the Ibero-American circuit. The merch that arrives with the company on Montjuïc works on all three fronts at once — the lobby stand, the dressing room after the show, and the programmer's office the following week. If the three lines are not coordinated, the Grec presence loses value without anyone noticing in the moment.

The most common operational challenge for a Mexican company traveling to the Grec is not the apparel or the gift — it is the logistics. Shipping from Mexico City or Guadalajara to the port of Barcelona has short windows before the performance cycle, and the Montjuïc venues have strict rules for delivery, storage, and loading hours. The program we build with you starts with one purchase order in MXN with CFDI 4.0 and Carta Porte 3.0, consolidates apparel, gifts, packaging, and export paperwork under the same tax ID, and resolves the European leg with a consolidated carrier that already delivers to Port Vell, Montjuïc, and the Eixample.

The dressing-room gift line deserves its own program because it cycles differently than the stand merch. While the stand goes up and comes down in a morning, dressing-room gifts are delivered before each performance and replenished between dates. For a three- or four-performance run at the Teatre Grec or the Mercat de les Flors, that difference forces us to manage separate inventories and staggered shipments. We treat the two lines as sister programs under the same purchase order but with distinct production and delivery calendars.

The post-Grec retention is where a Mexican company converts a European season into tour contracts. The programmers at the Lliure, the Nacional de Catalunya, the Romea, and other Catalan venues usually request a follow-up sample or a curated gift to bring to their artistic committee. The distributors of the Ibero-American circuit, the INAEM offices, and the programmers of partner festivals in Mérida, Málaga, and Sevilla often need a more complete kit delivered to their office two or three weeks after the Grec closes. If that retention leg is not programmed alongside the stand, the gifts for the European programmers tend to stay in the dressing room or in the tour suitcase, and the season value dilutes in the following months.

For producers with a track record in the European circuit — seasons at the Iberico, presence at FIT Valladolid, dates at the Madrid Autumn Festival, or earlier passes through the same Grec — the planning conversation also becomes an audit. We review the prior year's lines: which gifts actually reached programmers, which VIP boxes for cultural accounts were delivered with confirmed receipt, which stand pieces sat in storage, and how much of that inventory still has value for the next cycle. The audit is paid in MXN and produces a CFDI 4.0 with the same RFC pattern as the rest of the program.

The planning piece that almost always goes missing on a first participation is travel insurance and the chain of custody for cash and gift cards. When a VIP box includes value items or prepaid cards for specific cultural accounts, the insurance and the traceability matter as much as the contents. We quote the insurance as part of the purchase order, not as an add-on, and we deliver a manifest with per-recipient identifiers so your production team in CDMX has visibility piece by piece.

Production and logistics for the Grec Festival

The program operates under one purchase order in MXN with CFDI 4.0 and Carta Porte 3.0, consolidating apparel, gifts, packaging, and export paperwork. The European leg is resolved with a consolidated carrier that delivers to Port Vell, Montjuïc, and the Eixample inside the venue loading windows of the Grec. For producers with an IMMEX program in Mexico, the apparel can enter Europe under USMCA provisions when the piece was produced in Mexico, which reduces Spanish customs time.

Frequently asked questions