eBay OPEN25: How FGPG Turned a 30th Anniversary Into a Global Seller Celebration

Client: eBay   |   Event: eBay OPEN25   |   Location: The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV   |   Format: Hybrid Live + Virtual

Thirty years of sellers deserved more than a conference.

In 1995, someone sold a broken laser pointer on eBay. The buyer knew it was broken. They bought it anyway. That transaction: improbable, human, and entirely specific, is the founding story of a global marketplace built not on products, but on the people selling them.

By 2025, those people numbered in the millions. eBay’s 30th anniversary was a genuine milestone, and the company wanted to honor it in a way that matched the scale of what its seller community had built. The last time many of those sellers had gathered in person was 2019. Six years is a long time. The re-entry needed to feel like something.

The brief was as ambitious as the occasion demanded: a reimagined hybrid celebration capable of delivering education, inspiration, and real human connection simultaneously in a room and across the world. Not a conference with a livestream attached. A global event with two equally considered audiences and one coherent experience holding them both together.

A traditional conference format would have been a missed opportunity.

eBay’s seller community is made up of entrepreneurs, collectors, small business owners, and side-hustlers who built something real on a platform that gave them the tools to do it. An event that treated them like conference attendees would have felt like a category error.

The theme said it clearly: “Things. People. Love.” Three words that put sellers at the center before a single design decision was made. The eBay EVO Design system brought that theme to life spatially: saturated color used functionally to differentiate event sections and guide wayfinding across a campus this size.

The creative direction put sellers at the center of every experience rather than positioning them as an audience for eBay’s messaging. The distinction mattered in every design decision: where the energy came from, what the spaces invited people to do, and how the event communicated that eBay’s success is inseparable from theirs.

The event’s job wasn’t to tell sellers what eBay had accomplished in 30 years.

It was to show them what they had accomplished together.

That framing gave the experience a different emotional tone than most brand anniversary events land on. Less retrospective presentation, more collective celebration. The story of eBay’s first three decades was told through seller milestones, seller artifacts, and seller moments. 

100,000 square feet of Expo Hall. Every inch with a reason to exist.

The entry set a tone that the rest of the event had to earn.

Sellers didn’t walk into The Venetian’s Expo Hall, they arrived. A glowing tunnel opened into a clapping tunnel where eBay employees lined the path and cheered every seller through by name of category, by business type, by what they’d built. The eBay CEO was at the end of that tunnel, personally greeting attendees before the event had officially begun. That sequence — the anticipation of the tunnel, the warmth of the applause, the surprise of the CEO waiting — established the event’s emotional register before a single word of programming had been delivered.

The Museum of eBay made 30 years of history feel personal.

A walk-through exhibit traced three decades of eBay milestones through digital content loops, historic Seller Spotlights, advertising retrospectives, and a scale anniversary photo moment that let sellers see themselves as part of the story. Designed entirely around the pride felt of items sold through the year, the museum was less retrospective, and more celebratory, highlighting iconic moments through company and pop culture history. Every seller walking through it understood that the platform’s history included them.

The eBay Live Studio kept the show floor broadcasting.

A dedicated studio space with custom LED screen branding ran live news and seller interviews throughout the event, giving the Expo Hall its own editorial voice and giving virtual attendees a continuous window into what was happening on the floor. The Live Studio made the Expo Hall feel like something was always happening, which kept energy consistent across all three days.

The Warehouse Photo Op turned sellers into the content.

Oversized versions of the objects that define the seller experience. Bubble wrap rolls, sneaker boxes, packing tape, became the backdrop for a photo activation that let sellers literally step into their own brand story. The imagery it produced was theirs, not eBay’s. That distinction is the difference between a brand photo opportunity and one that actually gets used.

The Seller Clinic ran 500-plus coaching sessions in three days.

Hundreds of eBay staff experts offered one-on-one coaching and guidance throughout the event, with the Seller Clinic hosting over 500 personalized sessions. The coaching was specific, practical, and immediately applicable. It was the kind of value that gives sellers a concrete reason to be in the room beyond the energy of the event itself. Education delivered at this volume, without it feeling like a classroom, requires spatial design that makes individual conversations feel private inside a space that holds thousands.

The Live Print Shop made the moment tangible.

Custom, limited-edition T-shirts were silk-screened in real time as keepsakes throughout the event. Watching your shirt get made, with a design tied to this specific event and this specific year, turns a piece of clothing into evidence that you were there. That’s the kind of physical artifact that extends the life of an event long after the venue clears out.

The closing night brought the community off the convention floor.

On the final night of OPEN25, FGPG took the seller community to Tao Nightclub for the closing night party. A full venue buyout that traded the scale of the Expo Hall for something more intimate and celebratory. The brand didn’t disappear at the door. Branded entry arch graphics flanked the arrival experience, queue line barriers carried the eBay identity through the approach, and branded video loops ran across multiple screens at the restaurant level — including a seller celebration montage that gave the evening a specific emotional anchor.

Exterior and interior branding, LED covers, and custom signage extended the event’s visual language into a venue that operates on its own terms every other night of the year. That’s a different creative challenge than a convention hall is making a brand feel at home in a space it doesn’t own, without overwriting what makes the space worth going to in the first place. The party ran into general admission hours, with attendees staying on through the night. Three days of programming ended exactly the way three days of programming for a seller community should: together, and loud.

The programming ran at full intensity across three days.

More than 100 learning and networking opportunities over three days included DJ-fueled keynotes on a 60-foot LED main stage flanked by dual 16:9 iMag monitors, 10-plus breakout rooms, and fast-paced Spotlight Stage talks designed to move faster than a traditional conference format. The Seller Clinic ran 15 semi-private consultation stations for one-on-one GCX team sessions focusing on specific, actionable guidance that gives sellers a concrete reason to be in the room. Gold, Silver, and Bronze sponsor showcases gave partners tiered presence across the Expo Hall. Campus-wide digital signage spanned hallway arrays, four-sided pillar kiosks, and directional systems across the full Venetian footprint, and kept wayfinding clear and the brand consistent from registration through exit.

48,000+ joined virtually. The room had to be worth watching.

A hybrid event at this scale is a full-scale broadcast. The production quality, the energy capture, and the camera presence of every live moment had to be calibrated for a remote audience just as deliberately as for the nearly 2,000 people in the room.

The virtual experience contained a custom-built registration site, mobile app, and virtual attendee journey that included virtual sponsor booths and a dedicated digital pathway through the event’s programming. Live remote engineers provided real-time chat, phone, and ticket support for virtual attendees throughout all three days. The goal at the outset was 8,000 virtual participants. The final number was more than six times that.

That dual-audience requirement shaped every staging, lighting, and production decision. The keynote environment was built for broadcast — the 60-foot LED main stage, the color-controlled tube lighting, the iMag monitors — all calibrated for how it would read on screen. The Expo Hall experiences were designed with enough visual distinctiveness to translate clearly through a camera. The emotional moments were produced to hold through a screen without losing the human texture that made them worth attending in person, a very distinct balance.

When tens of thousands of people are watching, the live event stops being just a live event. Every design decision becomes a production decision too.

The result was a single event that worked for two fundamentally different audiences simultaneously: nearly 2,000 sellers in a room at The Venetian, and tens of thousands watching from wherever they run their businesses around the world. Neither audience got a lesser version. Both got eBay OPEN25.

The best brand events don’t celebrate what the company did. They celebrate what the community built.

FGPG designs and produces brand events that put the audience at the center of the story. From intimate press experiences to global hybrid productions at scale, if your brand is planning something that needs to work as well on a screen as it does in a room, that’s where we do our best work.

Let’s build something worth showing up for.