Spending three days in the desert for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival requires some planning. Portable phone charger? Check. Sunglasses? Check. Earplugs? Oops! Forgetting things like aspirin or sunscreen used to mean having to purchase it near the venue or living with a bad sunburn. This year, Amazon’s got you covered. For the first time ever, customers can shop and ship festival essentials directly to an Amazon Locker inside the festival.
“We brought Amazon Lockers to Coachella to give customers a delivery experience they might not have seen before,” said Tom Bradley, senior manager of North America Amazon Pickup Points.
Customers attending Coachella can shop the curated storefront on Amazon.com featuring a selection of festival essentials from a range of categories like fashion & accessories, beauty, health & wellness, tech, and camping. They then select an Amazon Locker named “Coachella” as their shipping address during checkout to ship directly to the festival.
Once their order is ready, customers receive an email with a barcode that they’ll use to pick up their package from an Amazon Locker inside the venue, where Amazon team members are onsite, ready to help. Some of the more popular items? Portable fans, sun hats, deodorant, and lip balm, which are especially useful when Palm Desert temperatures are known to top 100 degrees.
“As a company obsessed with customers, we find new convenient ways to get packages almost anywhere and at any time. And a festival is an extreme version of this, where normally customers couldn't get their orders this way,” Bradley said.
Actress and singer Vanessa Hudgens joined a steady stream of festivalgoers who shipped their festival essentials to an Amazon Locker. A Coachella veteran, Hudgens knows what it’s like to be inside the festival, only to realize you’re missing a few necessities. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come into the festival and been like, ‘Oh, a portable fan would be really nice right now,’ or ‘My phone’s about to die. I need a charger,’” Hudgens said. “This way, you can order it on Amazon and come over to the Lockers that are in Coachella and get exactly what you need. It could not be any more convenient.”
The Amazon Lockers at Coachella are wrapped in art created by Daria Krut, a user experience designer at Amazon. Her inspiration: the festival’s relaxed vibe, desert sunsets, and the physical landscape of Coachella Valley. A first-time festivalgoer, Krut was thrilled to be part of Amazon’s first Locker installation at Coachella, and to see her designs come to life. “Watching the wrap go onto the Lockers, I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is so cool, this is my art!’” Krut said. “Having art on the Lockers connects it to the whole Coachella experience.”
Activities like these are powered by the back-end technology that Amazon has worked on for years to improve the customer experience. “As Amazon continues to manage delivery of more of its packages, the increased control allows us to delight customers with even more offerings,” Bradley explained. “In the case of Coachella, our logistics network allows delivery to even more unique locations – meeting customers where it’s most convenient for them.”
Each day over both festival weekends, delivery drivers pull inside the festival gates to unload customer orders and place them inside the Lockers. The deadline to place orders for delivery during the second weekend of Coachella is Sunday, Apr. 21 at noon PDT.
Amazon Lockers are available in more than 900 cities and towns across the U.S. as an alternative, secure, and convenient delivery option available at no additional cost. Amazon Lockers are one of the many pickup points that Amazon offers to bring the ultimate convenience to customers. Other pickup points include Amazon Pickup Locations located in neighborhoods, cities and campuses across the U.S., and Hub by Amazon for apartment buildings.
