The streets of Kingston became a sea of yellow bananas last Wednesday as 1,600 Queen’s students dressed up in banana suits for a collective bar crawl.
Participants were divided into teams, venturing between local hotspots such as Stages Nightclub, Trinity Social, and Ale House & Canteen, completing a list of challenges and winning prizes along the way.
The bar crawl was born when three friends having a beer saw a group of bananas walk into a bar. Within weeks, the boys were hosting their first “Banana Bar Crawl” in Waterloo.
“We kind of snowballed the idea into organizing our own banana bar crawl where we can get hundreds of people wearing banana costumes,” Aiden Tighe, ArtSci ’19, said in an interview with The Journal.
Tighe, Noah Battaglia, and Luke De Haas currently run the mobile payment app Mosea, and recently expanded into hosting Banana Bar Crawls across Ontario. The business grew as tickets for the crawl were sold on the Mosea app and promoted on social media and through brand ambassadors.
“We knew if we could do the first one or two [bar crawls] successfully, it was going to take off from there,” Battaglia, a graduate of Dalhousie University, added.
During the sold-out crawl at Queen’s, the boys bounced from one bar to another, making sure everything was running smoothly. The team believes the goofiness of the event is what makes it most attractive to students.
Kingston’s local bars were keen to partner with Mosea’s Banana Bar Crawl. Stages and Ale House are typically closed on Wednesdays, so the idea of filling the bars with banana-clothed students was an attractive offer, Tighe said.
The Banana Bar Crawl has attracted new brand ambassadors through social media, a central part of their marketing strategy. This allowed them to expand to new regions, such as Fredericton, NB. The ambassadors aren’t paid conventionally, but receive merchandise or prizes for selling tickets and completing other tasks.
After the first bar crawl proved to be a huge success, the team had to solve logistical problems quickly.
“Since we’re doing all the bar crawls in such a short amount of time, we had to order thousands of banana suits,” Battaglia said.
Boxes of banana suits piled up in the team’s Toronto office before the next few bar crawls. The team ran into trouble when they had to fit all the suits into their van, cramming banana suits wherever they would fit, but eventually making it work.
“We had to set a max limit on tickets we can sell just because we physically could not possibly fit any more suits in our van,” Battaglia said.
The bar crawl’s Instagram has been flooded by DMs from students across Canada, begging for the team to do a bar crawl in their city.
In the future, the banana boys said they’ll expand into other fruits and vegetables, but there’s no telling which ones.
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