Some conferences are about sharing information. Others become a meeting place for ideas, ambition, and the people changing industries. The Global Woman Summit 2023 was very much the latter.
Held on 15–16 July, this was the seventh edition of a summit Mirela had been building since 2016. By 2023, it had become one of the UK’s best-known gatherings for women in business, with attendees traveling internationally to learn, connect, and create new opportunities.
The Woman Behind It
If you’ve spent any time around the UK’s women’s business community, you’ve probably come across Mirela Sula. Albanian-born and London-based since 2012, she is the founder and CEO of Global Woman Magazine and the Global Woman Club; a network that has expanded to chapters across multiple countries. Featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Sky TV, London Live, Forbes, and The Guardian, she has written over ten books and received the Icon 2023 Award.
But beyond the recognition is years of consistency. Community isn’t something she talks about; it’s something she’s spent years building.
The Event: What We Were Walking Into
The Global Woman Summit is not your average conference, and it had a clearly defining theme: The Power of Women Shifting the World. When Mirela puts on an event, people come from everywhere, and they come with high expectations. The venue was the Plaza Suite at the Hilton London Tower Bridge, a large, flat-floored hotel event space on Tooley Street.
Our job was to transform it completely across one build day and manage the production across two full show days.
With weeks of planning already underway, we produced detailed floor plans for the Plaza Suite and worked hand-in-hand with the venue’s team, mapping out the design concept; stage position, speaker layouts, lighting positions, the control booth, subwoofer placement, uplighter spread, and safe cable runs, basically, how every part of the room would blend unanimously.
The Build
- The Stage: This was the first thing to go up. We customized and extended the venue’s existing stage with an additional deck, finishing it with a red carpet surface and black PVC skirting to create a premium platform. On stage, a sleek Perspex lectern was set up with a dedicated microphone to give the speakers a prominent focus.
- The Custom Backdrop and Set Wall: Following soon after; a fully branded installation with returns on either side and batten uplighting running behind the ground row. This gave the stage visual depth, ensuring the summit’s identity was perfectly framed and visible throughout the event.
- Lighting: We rigged 12 moving heads across ceiling and ground-stacked positions, patched into a full lighting desk operated by our technicians. This gave us the flexibility to shift the tone and direction of the room as the schedule moved along. Alongside these, we installed 24 wireless uplighters around the perimeter of the room. With no cables running across guest walkways, we eliminated trip hazards while washing the walls in colors.
- Audio: The PA System was tailored precisely to the room’s dimensions. Eight speakers on round-base stands provided even audio coverage across the entire audience, supported by two subwoofers to add weight and warmth to the speech. Everything ran through a digital multichannel mixer at our control booth, giving our sound engineer total control over the inputs. Four handheld wireless microphones rotated between speakers and moderators.
- AV & Presentations: These were managed from our main control position. We ran two show laptops and two comfort monitors for presentation and video playback, using splitters and HDMI cabling to keep every feed secure. Our visual technician managed all content display on the fly, switching seamlessly between presenter slides, video content, and live graphics.
The Show Days
When the doors opened on Saturday morning, July 15th, the room was buzzing. Former ITV presenter and author Andrea McLean took to the stage for a session on visibility and media confidence, while clinical psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Yasmine Saad opened the programme with a keynote on resilience and emotional well-being, amongst many others.
Senior journalists and producers from the BBC and Good Morning Britain joined a live panel on media and women in business. International keynote speakers, mindset coaches, and leadership experts followed across both days. Through it all, our four-person technical crew remained live at their stations, managing sound, adjusting lighting scenes, and ensuring all was in place as every session unfolded.
The Final Wrap
By Sunday evening, July 16th, as the final applause echoed out and the summit drew to a close at 9:00 PM, the room cleared. Our crew moved back through the Plaza Suite to remove the lighting rig, break down the stage and backdrops, pack away the set wall, coil the cable runs, and load the truck.
This summit was the seventh edition. Mirela Sula has been doing this since 2016, and she shows no signs of slowing down. We were glad to be a core part of the team that built it.
🎥 Behind the Production: Global Woman Summit 2023 👉 Watch Here!
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