Banila Co wanted to create a mobile brand experience around Coachella Weekend One that could reach festival-goers beyond a single fixed location.

The concept centered on two custom-branded vintage Citroën vans serving frozen treats and Banila product samples throughout the Coachella Valley. With festival audiences moving between hotels, private events and shuttle stops across the desert, the opportunity was to use the vans' mobility to bring the experience directly to them.

Coachella is not a single-location audience. Festival-goers move through a network of hotels, private houses, influencer events and shuttle corridors across the valley before they ever reach the festival grounds.

Retro Roll built the mobile plan around that movement. Boutique hotels offered beautiful settings for guest engagement, photography and social content. Festival shuttle stops offered concentrated foot traffic and the ability to sample at much greater volume.

Two vans made it possible to pursue both at once. Each could operate with its own field team, move to a different part of the valley and adapt as audience traffic changed throughout the day.

Retro Roll transformed two vintage Citroën HY vans into matching Banila Co mobile sampling environments with coordinated gradient wraps, dimensional branding, onboard sinks and refrigeration.

Behind the visual experience was a complete mobile sampling operation. Retro Roll engineered the refrigeration and portable-power setup, coordinated branded serving materials and frozen-product service, secured and scouted hospitality locations, organized brand ambassadors, planned routes and operated two independent field crews.

The service experience changed with the environment. At influencer and hotel stops, hand-scooped cones created more styled, high-touch moments for guests and photography. At busy shuttle locations, pre-portioned branded cups allowed the teams to move quickly through festival crowds, pairing a frozen treat with a Banila product sample. Banila Co also layered in a social promotion: guests could post their own activation content, tag Banila Co and enter a product giveaway, adding a participatory UGC mechanic beyond the complimentary samples and ice cream available to everyone.

Before activation weekend, Retro Roll personally scouted the planned hotel and shuttle locations to confirm where the vans could park, how they would load in, where power was available and who the teams would work with onsite.

That preparation gave the crews room to be flexible once the weekend started. Hotel stops created polished, intimate interactions around pools and guest areas. When larger festival crowds gathered around the Palm Springs Convention Center and other shuttle locations, the teams could shift toward higher-volume sampling.

The two vans operated on separate routes with their own crews, while dedicated vehicle transport and a shared cold-storage support operation moved in parallel. The result felt spontaneous to festival-goers, but the experience was carefully coordinated behind the scenes.

Over two days, Banila Co’s two mobile activations moved across the Coachella Valley, connecting boutique-hotel experiences with high-traffic festival shuttle locations.

The strategy delivered two complementary kinds of reach. Hotel partners created intimate guest experiences and extended the activation through their own photography and social channels. Shuttle locations put Banila Co directly in front of concentrated festival traffic, allowing the teams to distribute frozen treats and product samples at speed.

At destination events, mobility can be part of the media strategy.

Retro Roll combines distinctive vintage vehicles with the strategy, customization and field execution needed to turn them into working brand environments.

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