Get to Know Gala Tent - Your Event Partner
Building Events, Building Trust.
Gala Tent has grown, over the past twenty years, to become the country’s largest and best supplier of commercial quality marquees and gazebos, and our mighty oak came from the humble acorns of the tenacity and never-say-die attitude of our Managing Directors, Jason Mace and Mark Thompson, and the core of a team that have been with Gala Tent since the very beginning.
The history of Gala Tent begins in March 1999, when Jason was tasked with finding a marquee to expand his parent's club in Hemingfield, Barnsley, not far from the current location of Gala Tent's headquarters. The marquee was required for the Millennium celebrations but tent rental companies all throughout the nation were out of stock.
Since there was nothing available to rent, the marquee hiring industry must have been experiencing its highest revenues in years. Thousands upon thousands of people had made the decision to celebrate at home rather than pay the exorbitant prices that would undoubtedly be associated with such a significant event as the turn of the millennium.
When there were no accessible tents for hiring, Jason found some from an importer, bought as many marquees as he could with a two-thousand-pound credit card investment, and then went door to door in the neighbourhood's bars and clubs, offering his party tents to establishments in a similar predicament. He received no interest, but Jason changed his marketing approach and re-marketed the product as "Millennium Marquees," to party organisers and soon he had sold out of all his stock.
Jason continued to reinvest his takings into more and more stock, and before long he had made a profit of 10,000 pounds, with an investment of the same figure from his brother-in-law, and now joint managing director, Mark Thompson, the pair entered a fifty-fifty business relationship, and Gala Tent was established.
By the year 2000, the very website that you have visited today was launched, and Gala Tent began life as the very first UK-based mail-order marquee supplier.
Turnover has grown exponentially over the past two decades, as has the number of items we are able to offer for next day delivery, and we’re no longer the localised operation that we once were. Mark and Jason still get their hands dirty daily, keeping a close eye on the way we run and how we present ourselves, and although we’re easily the most successful company within our sector, we remain the family business that we always were.
We have added financial technology and exclusive distribution licenses for international motorsport brands to our offerings, plus branded products from our in-house printing department, and now supply over 15,000 structures from our Distribution Centre on an annual basis. We count many high-profile individuals and organisations in our regular client base, and our only aim is to get bigger, and better at what we do.
Our products have been developed to the highest standards, and a lot of the time these developments have been based on customer feedback. We always try to remain at least two steps ahead of the competition, both from an operational point of view, and, more importantly, in the products we manufacture. Gala Tent is unquestionably the largest and best in the UK. Trust us, we’re the experts!
