How Fundbox digitized the entire Lost & Found process at Stone Techno Festival, from on-site returns to fully automated international shipping.
Every year, Stone Techno Festival welcomes thousands of visitors from all over the world to Essen. Whenever people from more than 50 countries come together, personal belongings are inevitably left behind, from wallets and bags to cameras, festival merchandise and vinyl records.
For festivals, managing Lost & Found is a unique challenge. During the event, items need to be collected, documented and returned quickly. Once the festival ends, however, the real challenge begins. International communication, shipping requests and countless emails create a significant administrative workload.
With Stone Techno, we ran the whole process on Fundbox instead.
A digital Lost & Found on site
Throughout the festival, Fundbox operated the official Lost & Found service on site. Visitors could hand in found items or collect recovered belongings directly at our stand.
At the same time, every item was digitized within seconds. A single photo was all it took: our AI analyzed the item, identified its characteristics and created a record. The inventory stayed complete and current for the whole festival.
The guest experience became digital as well. Through a link in the Stone Techno Festival app and QR codes placed across the festival grounds, visitors could report lost items at any time, without waiting in line or visiting the Lost & Found stand.
Less uncertainty for guests
At festivals, visitors often start looking for their belongings before someone has actually handed them in.
Traditionally, this leads to:
- Multiple visits to the Lost & Found office
- Uncertainty about whether the item has been found
- Unnecessary stress throughout the festival
Fundbox changed that.
Guests could report their missing item within seconds. As soon as a matching item was registered, they received an automatic notification. Instead of wondering whether their belongings had already been found, guests could simply rely on the platform to keep them informed.
Festival lockers, cleared in minutes
Festival lockers are the other case. After the event, lockers are cleared, and what is left behind is hard to assign to an owner by hand.
Using Fundbox, entire locker contents could be digitized within minutes and matched to their rightful owners, without spreadsheets or lengthy communication.
For Stone Techno, one of the most tedious post-event tasks took minutes.
The real work starts after the festival
Many Lost & Found solutions focus primarily on supporting operations during the event. For international festivals, however, the largest workload begins after the final performance.
Most visitors return home the very next morning, often to different cities or even different countries. Picking up lost property in person is simply not an option.
This usually results in:
A time-consuming process for festival teams, and a frustrating experience for guests.
Shipping, fully automated
Shipping is the part Fundbox automated end to end. Once an item had been confirmed, guests could choose to have it shipped through the platform, and Fundbox handled the rest:
- Verification of the correct item
- Shipping selection
- Payment of shipping costs
- Automatic shipping label generation
- International shipment preparation
For the festival team the job was: print the shipping label, attach it to the parcel, hand over the day's shipments.
The team collected no payments, answered no shipping emails, and coordinated no international deliveries by hand.
A better guest experience to the last contact
Lost & Found is often the last contact a guest has with an event.
With Fundbox, an administrative process became a digital service. Guests could track their request, receive automatic updates and recover their belongings from anywhere in the world.
Festival staff spent much less time on admin. Guests could see the status of their request and knew it was still being handled after the festival had ended.
The result
Stone Techno successfully digitized its entire Lost & Found operation with Fundbox, from collecting items on site to coordinating international shipments after the event.
The team answered far fewer emails, and guests abroad could get their belongings back without contacting the festival at all.
For a festival with an international audience, Lost & Found does not end when the festival does. That is the part Fundbox took over.