Shel­don Stephen is on a mis­sion to raise the stage for Car­ni­val through pro­duc­tion, in­vest­ment and spec­ta­cle.

On Fri­day he is set to un­veil the biggest stage in the his­to­ry of lo­cal Car­ni­val events.

Stephen, own­er and founder of the Lol­labee Group, has been plan­ning for months to have a 250-foot stage com­plet­ed for the Xpe­ri­ence Fete set to be held on Sat­ur­day morn­ing at the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my.

“This year we want to try to do what has not been done be­fore mean­ing by con­struct­ing the largest stage, so we are go­ing with what is an ap­prox­i­mate­ly a 250-foot stage, which I be­lieve would be the largest ever done in the Caribbean as well,” said Stephen who said he was in­spired to cre­ate such a spec­ta­cle af­ter at­tend­ing in­ter­na­tion­al events.

“Why? Be­cause I go to a lot of fes­ti­vals abroad and I like what I see when I go to those fes­ti­vals. So every year we try­ing to do some­thing nice for the peo­ple so I said let’s just go ex­treme­ly grand this year. And just give the peo­ple some­thing in­ter­na­tion­al,” he said in a phone in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian last week Fri­day.

At the time of the in­ter­view, Stephen said the stage was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent com­plete. He es­ti­mat­ed the stage would cost ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1 mil­lion, but it was mon­ey well spent to raise the lev­el of Car­ni­val in the coun­try as he al­so not­ed oth­er pro­mot­ers had stepped up ef­forts to cre­ate new ex­pe­ri­ences for pa­trons.

How­ev­er, the stage is just a con­tin­u­a­tion of Stephen’s con­tin­u­ous am­bi­tion over the years. Al­most two decades ago, Stephen dropped out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies to start his own busi­ness. That busi­ness would be­come Lol­labee Cel­lu­lar, which be­came well known as an au­tho­rised deal for Dig­i­cel, ex­pand­ing from a kiosk on High Street San Fer­nan­do in 2005 to a chain of stores na­tion­wide.

Stephen would seek to di­ver­si­fy even fur­ther and Lol­labee Cel­lu­lar would evolve in­to the Lol­labee Group as Stephen opened sev­er­al busi­ness­es; a con­struc­tion com­pa­ny in 2008, an event man­age­ment com­pa­ny, Lol­labee En­ter­tain­ment in 2009, a re­al es­tate com­pa­ny Lol­labee Re­al Es­tate in 2010 and a light­ing and spe­cial-ef­fects com­pa­ny Ex­pe­ri­ence Ef­fects Ltd in 2012.

In the past decade, the Lol­labee team be­came well known for events in South Trinidad, with sev­er­al ma­jor Car­ni­val fetes be­ing pro­mot­ed and man­aged by the group.

In 2019, the group un­veiled Xpe­ri­ence, an event where pa­trons are en­cour­aged to wear white, which has reg­u­lar­ly been suc­cess­ful both be­fore and af­ter the pan­dem­ic. A scaled-down ver­sion of the event was held in 2021, while it was not held in 2022 as a re­sult of re­stric­tions in place for the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. The event re­turned to its more tra­di­tion­al set­ting at the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my car park in 2023.

Stephen said he ex­pect­ed tick­ets for the 2025 edi­tion to be sold out days in ad­vance with the stage set to be a cru­cial el­e­ment to the event.

De­spite the mas­sive project, he is con­fi­dent that the stage would be done ahead of Fri­day’s event. He ex­plained that as a re­sult of the larg­er stage, he need­ed to hire more staff to achieve the goal.

“We def­i­nite­ly have a huge team work­ing on this project. And that was pre-planned. So, we’ve been in plan­ning for Xpe­ri­ence since about No­vem­ber, even be­fore that. But in terms of like ac­tu­al tech­ni­cal­ly plan­ning, we start­ed like No­vem­ber, De­cem­ber,” said Stephen, “A lot of props were built last year at the end of the year for Xpe­ri­ence. So we sort of did all that pre-planned stuff a month ago, two months ago and kept it in the ware­house. So now it’s re­al­ly as­sem­bly and the fi­nal touch­es (this) week and well, we should be good to go with that.”

But Stephen ex­plained the Xpe­ri­ence event and the stage are part of his con­tin­u­ing push to bring qual­i­ty events and en­ter­tain­ment to the South. He said hav­ing ac­cess to the Bri­an Lara sta­di­um has helped sig­nif­i­cant­ly in terms of putting on qual­i­ty events.

“I think we have a re­al­ly good fa­cil­i­ty that fa­cil­i­tates hav­ing big events. Bri­an Lara and its car parks are, luck­i­ly, a nice venue. Yes, we know it’s a crick­et sta­di­um, but the car parks are not for crick­et to be played. So in terms of that, we are lucky to have this venue that could fa­cil­i­tate big events. There is prop­er park­ing, and no noise is­sue be­cause it’s sort of away from res­i­dents for the most part. So that’s one of its strong points,” said Stephen who not­ed that his events had drawn crowds from around the coun­try with most shar­ing pos­i­tive re­views with him.

“For the last cou­ple of years, do­ing Xpe­ri­ence and just watch­ing every­body seems to al­ways be hap­py and hav­ing a good time and no fights and no mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And for me, that is im­por­tant. And I think just hav­ing a nice at­ten­dance keeps the vibe of the par­ty go­ing, you know. And every­body seems to al­ways have good re­views af­ter,” said Stephen.

Aside from the $1mil­lion dol­lar stage, which is be­ing con­struct­ed for Xpe­ri­ence event, Stephen and the Lol­labee team are in­volved in an­oth­er ven­ture which may change the dy­nam­ic of Car­ni­val.

The Lol­labee Group part­nered with Itz Rome, Strict­ly FX, and Star Glob­al Pro­duc­tion Stu­dios to pro­duce the So­ca Cham­pi­on com­pe­ti­tion, which was of­fi­cial­ly an­nounced last Fri­day.

When news of the new so­ca com­pe­ti­tion, which will adopt a re­al­i­ty show for­mat was an­nounced in De­cem­ber, Pro­duc­er Jerome “Rome” Pre­cil­la cit­ed the Lol­labee Group’s work over the years as one of the de­ter­min­ing fac­tors for the part­ner­ship as he aimed for the new com­pe­ti­tion to be at a world-class lev­el.

Pre­cil­la said, “Lol­labee Group which is a pre­mier en­ter­tain­ment com­pa­ny in T&T has de­signed and ex­e­cut­ed hun­dreds of large-scale events with over 15 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in the in­dus­try.”

He added that the com­pa­ny not on­ly did di­verse events but had han­dled mul­ti­ple large-scale events in that time.

“We have the Lol­labee Group, which does a lot of cor­po­rate and mu­si­cal events such as Xpe­ri­ence and these events have over 10,000 peo­ple in them,” said Pre­cil­la.

The com­pe­ti­tion has a mil­lion-dol­lar prize up for grabs, while it al­so fea­tures a Ju­nior So­ca Cham­pi­on, which will see the win­ner take home $200,000.