"It's only an achievement if it challenging!"

episode: 42 title: "Ep. 42 - "It's only an achievement if it challenging!", with Tamara Czartoryski" pub_date: "Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:02:15 -0100" original_language: english source_audio: "03d46f0a.mp3"

Hello Tamara, once again. I have to say that I practiced your last name, so I will give my shot. Perfect. Let's hear it. Yeah. So everyone, welcome to the WACK! Podcast. And I have the pleasure to welcoming Tamara Czartoryski. Excellent. Czartoryski, you say it better than my husband. I'm impressed. Well, it's easier once you just hear it and not read it. If you read it, you kind of have some mental cramps. So I'm really excited to have you here. Thank you so much. I had to write an intro because you gave me a couple of problems preparing this conversation because, well, for one, you have a lot of things about your mind. So it's a lot easier than most of my guests to find things. That is awesome. That is the good part. The difficult part is so many questions, so many interesting topics I would like to talk to you about, but we don't have the time for that. Not today. Even if we were here two weeks, probably wouldn't be enough. But I'll prepare something that I wrote, so now I'll read it. It's honestly quite a challenge to do justice to the journey in a single introduction. You've been involved in major international projects, from producing activations at the Emmys and Sundance to leading sponsorship integrations for global sporting events and heading up television and field campaigns. You've also found the time to organize charity galas in Portugal. One of them I very sadly couldn't attend. We'll have you next year. I hope so. And where was I going? Supporting young artists in Portugal. And you found the time to develop brands and initiatives at World of Luxury Entertainment and Culture, always with an international and innovative outlook. I have to say, I'd love to have the time to talk about these experiences with you, and let's be honest, the fact that you belong to a royal family, as a second cousin of the current King of Spain, would easily fill an entire episode on its own, but since the time is short, we'll have to focus on World of Weddings and more particularly in the inspiring work of Inspiration Live Music. So Tamara, it's an understatement to say, I'm very pleased and honored to have you on the show. So welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Rui, and the pleasure is mine. And I really want to thank you for taking the time and consideration to have me as part of your podcast. It's a great honor to be here. Well, just the interest and the availability of your time to be here, for me, is amazing. And I have to say that I'm kind of, I have to be embarrassed a little bit, because I only got to know Inspiration for, I think, about a year or something. But I'm feeling that a lot. And I think it's because of some brands. I always give this example with Patek Philippe and some other, that once you know, you know, but most of people don't know. And I think Inspiration fits that label for me. Because once I got to know what you guys do, I was completely mind blown. And my question to you is, what is Inspiration music? And how did it come to life? Where did the inspiration come to Inspiration music? So what is Inspiration music? You know, music is everywhere. Music is what fuels everyone globally and unites us. And we've sort of captured that. It's like when a child looks at a rainbow, and they feel joy, and they see all these colors. And then, you know, we've sort of grabbed all that happiness and joy and we've put it in a product, but a product that people can experience and feel the entertainment. So Inspiration is an interactive, immersive entertainment company. We're global, and we specialize in providing luxury entertainment for the private and corporate high end part of the market. We love to entertain, but we love to entertain because we like to challenge people to create real emotions to connect, and to create an experience that when they leave, they don't forget us. And you know, we've been lucky to see that in our work is that really, when people leave, they don't forget us. So yes, you're right. A lot of people don't know us yet. Those that know, know. And it's been an incredible journey. Inspiration started around 20 years ago in Paris by an artist named Gilles Bitton, an extraordinary artist with so much talent. And he set up his orchestra. And after a while, he realized that, you know, like most artists, he needed a better structure around him to help support him. And he brought in his first cousin, Jimmy Bitton, who's a real entrepreneur. I mean, he's one of those entrepreneurs that sort of, you know, he visions something, he manifests it, and then anything is possible. And he really makes it happen. And he had a vision. He had a vision that the world and the event market needed something that wasn't just a typical cover band, it needed something that could be crafted, created, bespoke entertainment, at a very high end with the worlds of music and fashion and dance and sound all meeting together. And he started a journey. That was exactly what I was going to ask you. Because once, although the name is Inspiration Live Music, your entertainment and your shows are a lot more than that, right? You have visual, you have dance, you have... So actually, our name was Inspiration Live Music. And recently, we've changed where our company is now just Inspiration. We're part of a larger corporate company. And we are Inspiration Music and Arts. Because it's exactly as you said, we bring everything to the table. It is music and arts. And anything and everything is possible in the creation and the execution of what we do. Yeah. But for you personally, what have drawn you to this, the music and the entertainment business and weddings? How did all this come up? So, you know, I was a model. I was an actress, reality TV star. I wasn't particularly good at any of them. You're the first guest I have that has a profile in IMDB. So, I wasn't... It's not a very large profile. You know, I had very large aspirations. But, you know, I didn't go as far as maybe I would have hoped to. I really enjoyed it. Music, theater, film, TV, it's one of my big passions. You know, I love to go to the theater. I love to experience it. I worked in the film industry in production. Once I realized that potentially I wasn't going to get an Emmy or an Oscar anywhere near that. And then I started working doing activations, product placement. And, you know, my dream was always to... My dream had always been to be on the stage. I did a show where I was in the circus. I had a lot of fun. And when I moved to Portugal, I was working in the sports industry doing very large scales events, which I loved. It was super challenging, but great. And I started planning my own wedding. And I decided to engage the company Inspiration to do the entertainment at my wedding. And they really did change my life, the night of my wedding. So, after experiencing what they did at my wedding, and actually, you know, I was there, I experienced all my guests' experiences. And one of the things I remember is in the weeks following, and, you know, we had the best time, is everyone kept messaging me, you know, oh my God, what was that entertainment? What was that music? It was insane. And these were people that come from LA, New York, London, you know, they've been all around the world and they hadn't experienced anything like this. And I found that quite outstanding. You know, so after my honeymoon, I called Jimmy and Jill, and I basically said to them, listen, I really want to work with you. And I think they were a little bit hesitant at first. They said, well, you know, Portugal, I mean, there's not that many events there. You know, we're in France, the head office. And I said, well, Portugal is changing. And I was in the right place at the right time. And luckily, this was 2017. So, of course, there were a lot of, there were, of course, weddings happening, but it wasn't, you know, Portugal wasn't on the map as a fashionable place yet. You didn't have these destination weddings yet, or these big corporate events happening. And Jimmy and Jill took the chance with me. They told me that I could try it, and I will be forever grateful to them. And I had this amazing product that I was able to take to a market, which was about to explode. And as you know, sort of 2018-19, Portugal started changing. Then post-COVID, it was just an explosion. It was a, Portugal became the most fashionable place in the world. Well, you would say that far? I think it is incredibly fashionable. I think it's massively, you know, it's a destination place. Everyone's talking about it. People are moving from all over the world for a variety of reasons, be it the weather, the cost of living, the safety. You know, it's in Europe. It's easy to get everywhere. There's a good quality of life. And, you know, Portugal became cool. I've been coming to Portugal since as far back as 1996. And so many of my friends would say, why are you going to Portugal? Why aren't you going to Saint-Tropez or Marbella? And, you know, you would hear about all these luxury destination weddings in Saint-Tropez or La Combe, you know, and now Portugal is the destination. Well, yeah, but it's, as you say, it was more or less an expected boom the last few years, because it was growing, 17, 18, 19, of course. But then with COVID, I think most people just felt, well, this is just us hitting pause. And then after it, it just really boomed completely. I was completely aware of those things until the past couple of years. And it's really interesting to hear you talking about that in those terms, and also hearing about Portugal in all the most variable places. And even in the small things like here in the country, in series and movies, because, well, people just got to know the country, the name. It was always Spain, Spain, Spain. And now you get small references and things that it's awesome and weird. It was always a gem. It was just a hidden gem that very few had the luxury of knowing about. Yeah. But let's just go back for a minute. You said you were coming here a lot, but for a lot of years, because although you were born in London, I was born in London. I knew that you would spend most of your life in London. I didn't know if you were born there. So it was usual for people from the UK to come to Portugal. I think those were the first communities to really come here. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I had some dear friends that actually lived here. So I used to come frequently. And my family from my father's side had a house here. So I was often here. Everyone who sees your profile and sees what inspiration is, I think you will probably ask this question. That is, how do you prepare for each event? Because it's not just doing things big. It's doing things big in places that probably cannot be repeated elsewhere, because it's really special and peculiar in some of the venues you do in Italy, in castles. How do you approach each event and specifically each wedding? It's a really good question. So every couple, if it's a wedding, and every client has a different story or experience they want to tell. And the way we manage this is we have a creative, we have a creative team. We have special project managers. And we have 75 people in the office dealing with the overall structure of inspiration. We have our own recording studios in Paris, where we get the artists in and we do special medleys, mashups of songs, we create new tableaux and morceaux of music. We have three dance studios where we have the dance team and artists rehearsing at least three times a week. And then we also work with a lot of different special effects. We have an atelier with over 4000 costumes, which every day it's adding. So it's a great place to go for fancy dress for me or when I want to borrow a dress. And, you know, to say that basically, we have a very large, very, very large team, both in the back office, so the logistics, the chef de projet, the technical, we have our own in-house travel team, down to the creatives, the choreographers, the ateliers making costumes. So, you know, we're able to give each client a totally bespoke service and basically create a unique event for them. That sounds difficult to manage. Yes, it is. It's very awesome. And, you know, it's not difficult to manage in the terms that we really have the best of the best. So, yes, what I was talking about, I was saying it's not hard to manage, because when you have the top level people that know their job, it's not a management job anymore, because you have people that, you know, can carry the weight and the responsibility. I was talking about, yeah, I was talking about the difficulty in terms of the logistical things and the communication, the processes you have to have. It's all, I agree with you, once you have very talented people and top people, things get easier, but it's always a big project. It is. But imagine that for every wedding, you have like a 10-person dedicated team on each client's event from us. And that's not with the artistic, in terms of that's not talking about the musicians and the artists. You have, you know, the logistics, the travel, the costume designer, the artistic director, the chef de projet. So, we have a full team dedicated to each client. Yeah. Well, it makes sense once you have, once you see the final result, you kind of understand that, yeah, you need that. You need the musicians to be dedicated to the music only, and the dancers to the dance only. What is the big challenge or the big challenges that you are used to encounter on these big projects or those that are really more enjoyable to you? Yeah, I mean, I guess the big challenge is the things that are out of your control. So, you know, flight delays, cancelled flights, lost luggage, and all those fun things that happen when you're traveling or you're traveling with teams. And because we have like a 24-hour in-house travel team, they manage to sort of fire shoot those problems. But of course, you know, it's always, it can be tiring. And what was the second part of the question? What do I enjoy the most? Yeah, the most enjoyable challenges for you. I think it's seeing the creation from start to finish and the conclusion of it. And really, it's often afterwards hearing your client's feedback. That, for me, is the most rewarding. It's either seeing the client on the night, if I happen to be at the event, and you see how much everyone is enjoying it or getting their feedback afterwards. It's always a, it's a great feeling. I can imagine. You're managing the events in Portugal, right? Is that your main...? No, so I am the strategic and, so I'm the director of strategy and development. I deal with the development and marketing worldwide, as well as client liaison, VIP clients. I started on the Portuguese market in a market that didn't really have the product. It had done a few events. And now I'm very lucky to have a great team here that have joined me. But no, I deal with it all globally. So I just got back last night from France. I was there at the head office working with the team. And, you know, now I'm working on events in other parts of the world. What is happening around the world in weddings globally that most amazes you? You know, I love the creativity that goes into weddings. I love to see how different planners work, how different designers... Oh, I didn't hear you cut out. Yeah, I was guessing, what do you see changing in the world on wedding markets globally? So you go through trends, you know, I mean, I think the wedding industry, like every industry has trends. We have everything from seeing lots of headliners, so big celebrity names performing with us. We get the opportunity to perform with a lot of them. We're very privileged. We're now being taken more and more as a headliner act alongside these people. You know, a lot of creativity going into technology, which is amazing. And then, of course, we're seeing a lot of weddings with a lot of acrobatic performances. So high energy circus stunts. Do you have any particular memorable event that you had? Either an entire event that was memorable for a lot of reasons or maybe one event within the event that it was really memorable for you? That's a good question. There's so many good ones. We have time. We have time. I think my two standout ones is last year. We signed an amazing date for a very nice client who wanted to do a July 4th opening of the Olympic Games ceremony party. And it was for 100 guests sit down dinner in their private home. And we had around 120 artists and we we did the most. You had more artists than guests. Yeah, but it was it was absolutely extraordinary. We had everything from, you know, the walking of the flags to mapping on the house to acrobats coming off balloons in the air. And we had a trample wall where musicians turned into acrobats. It was it was really, really, really a phenomenal event. And, you know, there was that we did the closing ceremony of GCAT in Cannes where we had around 250 artists. So it was a seven minute closing ceremony, which was which was exceptional. We prepared it in two weeks and that was a lot of fun as well. So now we have so many amazing events. It's hard to choose. So in this industry, you kind of know and hear people talking about the repetition and the fatigue, the years and doing the same. And that that doesn't sound at all like that. It sounds it sounds hard. It sounds complex. It sounds difficult in very, very ways, but it really sounds exciting because, you know, it's once in a lifetime you have to work your butt off to to pull everything together. But then it's just, OK, this is done. Let's go to the next. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the first one. So. And that's the thing is it keeps it innovative, it keeps it exciting, interesting. It keeps you using your mind and your brain and your creativity. And I think that's what makes us all tick. Yeah. And talking, bringing the example to me as a photographer, since last year, we started doing only 10 to 12, 13 weddings a year. And the our mindset to each wedding is completely different because we never did a lot of them. We have one year, we had one year that we did 31 post-COVID, but usually we're 25, 27. But even even then, it wasn't a whole year, a whole summer busy. And there was a point where you entered in maybe in cruise control. And once you go down and do 10, 12 and really dedicate yourself to to each one, it's a lot it's a lot more interesting to us. But as I was telling you earlier, we arrive and capture things once they are ready and prepared. You have the chance to do everything new all over again. And it really sounds. Yeah, it's it sounds exciting. It is exciting. It's challenging. But nothing that doesn't have a challenge is an achievement. And I think that that's what exciting. And I think that's across the board in events, everyone has challenges within their domain. And we need to keep pushing the boundaries and reaching a bit further and trying to see how far we can explore and how far we can innovate and how much creativity we can get and always finding ways to even better ourselves. So, you know, making sure that we don't just settle for comfort and get complacent. I think that's super important. And I think it's easy to get complacent and think like, yes, we have something that's good and not not go the extra step. And I think what inspiration does well is we always go not the extra step, but the extra mile, particularly on luxury weddings. And we talked a bit about Portugal. But my understanding is the global luxury wedding is now almost, I don't know what the percentage is, but I think the main percentage is in Europe right now. Is this new in some ways? Or do you think it's sustainable for the long term? What to have the global luxury weddings in Europe? Yeah. Do you think this is a trend or just a really change in behavior? So I don't necessarily think it's a trend or a change in behavior. I think that the wedding industry is a huge, huge industry. It's average to be around a 300 billion a year industry. The amount of high net worths that come to Europe to vacation has always been, you know, the same and it keeps growing. They're saying that by, I believe it's 2030, the wedding industry in Europe alone will be around 500 million. But actually, I think that Europe currently only has about 26% of the weddings worldwide. Total weddings or high net worth weddings? Total weddings. Total weddings. I think the high net worth is, you know, I think a lot of them come because you have places like Venice, which of course are like, you know, you get those amazing Instagram moments of everyone being, you know, shuttled around on the boats and, you know, Lake Como has the charm that goes with it. You have the architecture in Europe that you don't have in America. You have that sort of more historical architecture that people love. So I think the trend will remain where we have a hindrance is on the sound restrictions. So, you know, a lot of the European countries are changing the sound restrictions. In Italy, we have a lot of problems for sound restrictions. So parties need to move inside by 11pm. And I think that's why Spain and Portugal have received many more weddings in the recent years. Well, that's interesting. Because Italy and France, but I think Italy at the moment is probably the most known place for luxury weddings. Absolutely. But I'm hearing some things that are going against that being one of them. I recently heard about photographers, about venues that are only allowing local photographers and local vendors. Do you see things like that happening? Do you think that? Honestly, I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that. And I haven't heard that. Again, I don't have the experience in that area in terms of, you know, when our clients want us, we're able to go to wherever they need us. So we don't have that issue. So it doesn't mean that I would necessarily have been made aware of those problems. Yeah, but with those restrictions that you talk about sound, do you think that will shift or change more of the market here? Yes, I think it's why we've received a lot more market. And I think it will continue to push the market here. The problem we will always have in Portugal is that we don't have enough big wedding venues. We don't have enough choice. Yeah. We have amazing choices, but just not many of them. Yeah. And so that's, you know, if you go to Italy and you see, you know, even the south of France and France, you have amazing chattels and palaces and there's a quantity of them that's extraordinary. So people can keep reinventing their weddings. But, you know, we're lucky we have new venues opening this year here in Portugal that are meant to be suspended. It's absolutely beautiful. Sometimes it's frustrating here in the north, especially we have a lot of palaces and castles and things that are just not taken care of. There's a beautiful small house, small palace here in Braga, but it's completely abandoned. And it's frustrating. I understand it's really difficult and costly to maintain those places, but we could have a lot. But we have to think that with all the infrastructure coming in, hopefully that will change slowly. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I hope so. So let's now talk a bit about community, which is always an interesting and difficult topic within probably I would guess in every industry. But I always felt that we had a great community and I still feel that. But I think we are creating a lot of pseudo rock stars. And I think it's hurting the community. Do you have an opinion? Do you have a feeling about that? I think it's important for people to be respectful of each other, of course. And I think it's important as a community to be collaborative and to work together in a kind manner. And I think it's important that people understand that there's enough clients out there for everyone. It's not a competition. It's about helping each other and making each other look good. Whenever you work with multiple suppliers, the end result that we all want is ultimately the same one. It's to have a happy client. And that will guarantee the next client. So I think people need to learn that collaborative process again and relook at how they approach different things. And instead of sort of working singularly just in their field, it takes the whole team to make an event go well. It's not just one person or one supplier. And then I think what's been happening in Portugal is that there's been, as we were saying, the industry has exploded, let's say, in the last few years. And I think that people need to be respectful to other people's work and create their own content and work and not piggyback off other people's. I think creativity is, everyone has their strengths and everyone should find their own strengths within their own field, not copy the strengths of another company because it doesn't give you the unique edge. Yeah, exactly. What I feel is, as a country, as an industry, we grew too much too fast. Some people were caught not by chance, but of course, a lot of them, most of them have talent. But I think some people have caught the wave. And some brands, I'm talking about people, obviously, these people, but some brands just caught the wave. And well, since I had the podcast, people kind of feel, tell me things and confide in me. So, I'm hearing things that I prefer not to hear, but they tell me anyway. It's like when someone goes to the hairdresser, they tell their hairdresser all their secrets and problems. You've got this new job, it's great. What I think is that we all need to remember is that being transparent and honest is better, not only for us, but for the whole community. A short-term fix is never a long-term fix, not for us as an individual or us as a community. And if we all work together with the same vision, we will all do well. If people work with a closed vision, it will affect the whole industry. Yeah, completely right. And you said it before, the goal is to have a happy client. To have a happy client, you can have one vendor that did well, then the others did okay. You only have a great event if everyone goes as best as they can. Sometimes you just need to drop the camera and help with anything else. But that's exactly it. On an event, like we know, things change in the last minute, things can happen. Unexpected, even when you had plan A, plan B and plan C. Teamwork is working all together, whether it's me making sure that my musician can suddenly jump in and sing another ballad because the main course isn't ready and we don't want the guests, or whether it's you jumping in to take a photograph that was not cute. So, we're there to work as a team and it needs to be that way. It's just that when we work as a team, the result is better. So, this is an amazing way for us to wrap this first part, but I have a last question. What are your hopes? It is a two-part question. Your hopes for first, the community. When I say community, I'm broadening it up around all the vendors and all the community in Portugal and for inspiration itself. What are your hopes for those two parts? So, for the community in Portugal, of all our vendors, suppliers, my hopes are that Portugal continues to deliver an excellent service, that we keep pushing to understand how we can better serve clients coming from other countries to fit with their cultures and needs and their belief in how the hospitality industry should serve them, and that we can work to continue to better our services and not feel we have reached our limit. I believe we will keep getting very high-end weddings and clients, but we need to look after them and we need to be honest and transparent, both with our clients and with ourselves and our other vendors, to make sure that everything works simultaneously together for a long, healthy future. Yeah, sounds great. For inspiration, I have many, many hopes. Many of them have already happened. You know, the future is bright. I see so many things, so many opportunities performing in so many countries. To say, do I have one hope? I don't, because every time we get one of these new experiences, like the opening or closing ceremony, I think that I've ticked that off. What's next? What could I possibly get next? And then it's, you know, we played with Coldplay and Seal, and so it keeps happening. So, what I hope for inspiration is we keep creating as we do, we keep innovating as we do, and at Inspiration, what we have which is very special is we have a family that works together in a close-knit structure with kindness, creativity, and a huge vision. And I believe we are manifesting for us a very good future. Yeah, and definitely enjoy the journey, not just waiting for the destination. It's the most important. It's the most important. Tamara, this was a real pleasure, despite the technical challenges. Some real technical problems in 2025. By the time we do episode two, I hope I will have resolved my technical issues. No problem, no problem. It was amazing, and I'm really looking forward to broaden the scope of our conversation. I would love that. I would really, really enjoy that. So, thank you so much, and see you in a couple of weeks. So, bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.