At San Diego's First Craft Distillery, inKind Found Its Next Creators

619 Spirits North Park is San Diego's first urban craft distillery, known for cane-sugar vodka in flavors like scorpion pepper, cucumber, and rose petal, distilled and bottled right on-site in North Park. It's exactly the kind of only-in-San-Diego spot inKind was built to help people find. Working with Relish, inKind hosted a creator night at 619 Spirits, using an evening of craft cocktails to put its own app in front of the right San Diego audience.

The Opportunity
inKind's challenge isn't finding good bars and restaurants. It's getting people to actually open the app. The best way to do that is to hand it to people who are already telling their followers where to go.

The question: how do you make an app demo feel like a night at a craft distillery, instead of a tutorial?

The Strategy
Relish and inKind built a creator night at 619 Spirits designed to let the app sell itself through a real experience, not a screen recording alone.

Key tactics included:

Real venue, real stakes: 619 Spirits' on-site distillery and patio gave creators a genuinely unique night to film, not a staged demo.

App-in-action content: Creators were briefed to capture a quick screen recording or voiceover of inKind in use, woven naturally into the night rather than bolted on.

Dining credit, not a script: A $100 inKind dining credit let creators experience the app's actual value, an easy, no-friction night out, instead of just talking about it.

Bonus-driven urgency: A $5 cash bonus for posting within 5 days and including an affiliate link kept content timely and trackable.

Community framing: The event was pitched as a San Diego creator celebration, not a paid ad shoot.

The tone: local pride, craft culture, and unmistakably San Diego energy.

The Results

24 pieces of creator content

21,985 total views

1,407 engagements

6.4% engagement rate

No single post carried the campaign. The top post (a National City creator's TikTok) pulled 2,390 views, but reach was genuinely distributed across 19 different creators and five cities beyond San Diego proper: National City, Carlsbad, Escondido, and Chula Vista- proof the invite traveled well past North Park.

Why It Matters
The best way to sell an app isn't a screenshot. It's a night out that happens to be easier because of it.

619 Spirits gave inKind a setting genuinely worth discovering, an on-site distillery most San Diegans have never seen, and Relish gave inKind a room full of local voices to carry that discovery back to their own audiences.

Because nobody downloads an app from a feature list.

They download it because someone they trust just found a hidden gem because of it.

Ready to turn your next inKind event into real local buzz? 👉 Let's talk.