A ticketing company, built from the ground up.
- SECTOR
- Cultural events & ticketing
- ENGAGEMENT
- Embedded as technical co-founder
- PERIOD
- November 2025 to now
THE CLIENT
Empiria Events is a Toronto company founded by Marianna Michalitsianou to market and stage heritage events, from Greek concerts and galas to the Greek International Film Festival Tour of Canada and a Hungarian film week. Its line is “connecting the world through culture and celebration.” Before 2026 it sold tickets through a WordPress shop and other people’s platforms, and paid their fees.
WHAT SHE NEEDED
Her own platform: a shop her audiences would buy from, a dashboard her organizers could run events from, and an admin console to see the whole business. She needed it to handle assigned seating in a theatre, refunds, tax in every province, and volunteers scanning tickets at the door, and she needed it without hiring an engineering team.
WHAT WE BUILT
Six applications on one database and one sign-in: the public shop, the organizer dashboard, the admin console, the attendee wallet, onboarding and the marketing site. Underneath them, a new database designed from scratch around her business, so an event, its seats, its orders and its payouts all live in one model. On top of it, the features her old stack could never have sold her: a seat-map designer, version one of a tool of our own, where an organizer uploads a photo of the venue and draws the zones and seats straight onto it, with live holds so two buyers can never pick the same seat; tickets that drop into Apple and Google Wallet; and a fully custom Stripe integration that splits revenue between co-organizers, works out tax per province, and issues registered charities their donation receipts.
HER IDEAS, OUR ENGINEERING
The best features started as her sketches. She wanted to art-direct her own landing pages and event collections, so we built her a page-creation tool from scratch, and she composes them herself, with no developer in the loop. The whole platform works that way: when she has an idea, we build it in, and it becomes part of software she already owns.
WHAT IT REPLACED
Before this she ran a prebuilt WordPress shop with a stack of paid plugins, and paid every month just for the ability to sell a ticket. Her overheads now are hosting and the database, about a tenth of what the old stack cost her.
NOW
The platform is live at empiria.events, selling cultural heritage events across Canada and the US. We still run it with her: a bug on her customers’ side is ours the moment she reports it, fixed within hours, worst case the same day. She never waits on a support queue for an answer, because we are the people who built it. That has been the arrangement every day since launch, and it is not stopping.
- APPLICATIONS
- 6
- PAGES
- 72
- LINES OF CODE
- ~90,000
- BUILT IN
- NOV 2025 – MAY 2026
See it running.
The platform is in production. These links open it.
PENDING
A note from Marianna Michalitsianou (CEO & Founder, Empiria Events) will appear here once she has signed off on it. We do not publish a quote under a client’s name before they have.
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Tell us what you’re building and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right people for it.