The name den Atelier means workshop in Luxembourgish, which makes perfect sense for a venue built inside a former Renault truck garage. It holds around 1,200 people, the stage sits slightly off-center, and on any given night the crowd stands close enough to the artist to feel the intimacy that the venue has always been known for. That closeness is not incidental. It is, for the people who run it, the whole point.
Sébastien Collet has been Marketing and Communication Coordinator at den Atelier since 2019. His role spans digital advertising, graphic design, customer service, and ticketing — a breadth that reflects the lean, hands-on culture of the venue. Before landing in the cultural sector, he spent time in banking, an experience he describes as the catalyst that pushed him to follow his passion for live music instead.
A Venue With Two Faces
den Atelier opened in 1995 and has since become one of Luxembourg's most recognized live music venues. The organization behind it, A-Promotions, promotes events across the Grand Duchy, working with venues including Rockhal, Philharmonie de Luxembourg, and the open-air stage at Luxexpo. This network of partnerships intensified during and after COVID, driven by a simple philosophy: put the right artist in the right context. A seated venue like Philharmonie suits an entirely different act than an open-air stage at Luxexpo.
What makes den Atelier unusual is its dual identity: a 1,200-capacity club with an intimate soul on one hand, and a large-scale outdoor promoter capable of staging Katy Perry, Robbie Williams, and Lenny Kravitz on the other. The summer open-air season now accounts for roughly 60 percent of annual ticket revenue, with shows at up to 15,000 capacity and ambitions to push further still. "The ambition is there," says Sébastien. "If we can find a bigger stage, why not Billie Eilish or Eminem? I can't wait to see where we'll be in ten years."
Luxembourg's position at the crossroads of French, German, and Belgian cultural zones gives den Atelier a uniquely broad audience reach. The act that's booked determines who shows up: a Belgian rock band like Triggerfinger brings crowds from across the Belgian border, a French hip hop act draws fans from northern France, and the biggest names fill the open-air venue with audiences from Luxembourg and all three neighboring countries. "The audience follows the artist," Sébastien says. "Our target audience depends entirely on who we book."
Ticketing That Never Misses a Beat
For Sébastien, good ticketing starts with infrastructure. "A great platform is the heart of ticketing — CRM, marketing data, pricing, reporting. Everything in one place," he says. Having all customer and sales data centralized in ticketmatic gives den Atelier the foundation to segment audiences and turn those insights into targeted marketing, from pre-sale campaigns to post-show follow-ups. From the customer's side, the priority is equally clear: the experience needs to be "smooth, reliable, and built to handle the traffic" when a high-demand on-sale hits.
Mobile ticketing is where Sébastien sees the most transformative potential. den Atelier recently started using the ticketmatic app and he is enthusiastic about what it already offers, and even more so about where it is heading. He is looking forward to push notifications, and in time would love to use the app to target fans in an even more granular way, for cross-selling purposes for example. Secure Tickets with dynamic QR codes is also available and firmly on his radar. "It really redefines the way we are going to interact and communicate with the customer," he says. Secure Tickets, in particular, address a real problem: dynamic QR codes make tickets non-transferable outside the app, protecting fans from fraudulent listings on resale platforms. "The most important benefit that we could take out from this is preventing people from being scammed."
One Size Fits None: ticketmatic and the Studio Advantage
Den Atelier moved to ticketmatic in September 2019 for one immediate reason: the bespoke system they had been running crashed when Rammstein went on sale. Management needed something built for scale. What they found was a platform that addressed the full scope of their needs in one place. “I love that ticketmatic meets so many different needs," Sébastien says. "Customer relationships, marketing data, the sales flow — all within the same platform."
Equally important is the human dimension. "The best advantage of ticketmatic is being able to have this human-level company," he says, a team of around 20 people rather than an impersonal multinational where clients disappear into a queue.
The introduction of ticketmatic Studio has taken that relationship further. Where ticketmatic was once a powerful but standardized solution, Studio opens the door to custom development built directly into the platform's architecture, allowing organizations to shape ticketmatic around their unique way of working, their marketing setup, and their specific tool stack. For den Atelier, the first Studio project is a self-service customer portal embedded in the venue's own website and visual identity. Visitors are now able to log in, retrieve tickets, review purchase history, and update personal details without ever contacting the box office.
"We've been wanting this forever," Sébastien says. "Now we're seeing real flexibility, and we can't wait to implement changes at multiple levels." Den Atelier is among the first ticketmatic clients to go live with a Studio project, and the self-service portal is just the beginning.
A Relationship Built to Last
Unprompted, Sébastien sums up the partnership in a single sentence: "We're really quite happy with ticketmatic and we look forward to building on that for many years to come." It is the kind of remark that means more for not being asked, and it captures what den Atelier values most in a technology partner: not just capability, but character.
The road ahead is ambitious: 25,000-capacity shows once the right venue can be found, a younger audience to win, and using the ticketmatic app to fundamentally change how they connect with their fans. Underpinning all of it is the conviction that the right infrastructure, built with the right partner, can stretch to meet almost any ambition. ticketmatic Studio represents a new chapter in that story, one where the platform no longer merely accommodates den Atelier's growth, but actively enables it.
%20Jantien%20Vermeiren-1.jpg)
