A Moment to Reset: Ballantine’s Hosts Creators at Carven

True Beginnings with Ballantine’s took place on February 7 at Carven, marking the second edition of a gathering the brand introduced last year as a way to start the creative calendar on a quieter note. The event was designed as a pause, a moment for reflection before the year’s work begins in earnest.

Ballantine’s has long been present in nightlife culture, working closely with raves, festivals, and parties. Music sits at the center of that relationship. As Ebere Aham, Brand Manager for Ballantine’s, explained during the event, the idea of “true sound” today is shaped largely by DJs and curators — people who set tone, build communities, and guide how music is experienced.

Saturday’s gathering brought together about 60 people, all invited intentionally. Over the course of each year, Ballantine’s builds relationships with creators across different disciplines, collaborating with them through various partnerships. True Beginnings offered a chance to step out of those working contexts. It was a space for DJs, streamers, gamers, and musicians to slow down, reconnect, and spend time together without an agenda to deliver or perform.

The premise of the day was simple: give creators room to reflect on where they are, what the past year demanded of them, and what they want the next one to look like. In an industry that rarely allows for stillness, Ballantine’s framed the event as an invitation to pause and deliberately shape the year ahead.

At the center of the experience was a vision-boarding session using Ballantine’s “Wall of Us.” Guests mapped out personal goals and creative intentions, working with physical prompts rather than screens. The exercise set a collaborative tone, encouraging conversation and shared perspective rather than isolated planning.

Alongside the vision-boarding was a bottle engraving activity, where guests created personalized messages on bottles they could take home. Stickers, scrapbook prompts, and goody bags rounded out the day, extending the experience beyond Carven and into whatever the year might bring.

For the creators in attendance, True Beginnings was less about brand presence and more about permission to experience rather than produce, to reflect rather than rush. In that sense, the event captured Ballantine’s ongoing approach to culture: showing up not only in the loud, celebratory moments, but also in the quieter spaces where direction is set.