At a Hollywood gifting suite in September 2018, Gene Sheynis had an introduction to make. Writer Louise Sattler had arrived at the Millennium Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles, where Celebrity Connected was gathering brands and guests ahead of the Emmys. Sheynis invited her over to the Sportamix booth to learn about a sports networking platform and meet sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Amid the merchandise, someone was exhibiting a way to meet people.
The moment is a useful place to begin with Sheynis, founder and CEO of Celebrity Connected. Awards weekends provide the scenery for his events business, but an introduction gives the story its action. Here was the organizer directing a visitor toward another conversation. The room had done its first job by bringing them together. He supplied the next step.
There is something pleasantly literal about the company name. Celebrity Connected leaves little room for an existential brand workshop. It describes a transaction in ordinary language: people with products get to meet people with public recognition. At its most human scale, the business consists of a host, a visitor and a reason to cross the room.
The host has a business proposition
Based in Beverly Hills, California, Sheynis describes himself professionally as a serial entrepreneur, mentor and adviser to businesses in the United States and abroad. His education includes Rosnou University, where he lists attendance from 1991 to 1996. The description places him among founders who work across businesses, rather than presenting one company as the entire occupation.
Celebrity Connected gives that occupation a visible setting. The company organizes gifting events where exhibitors can explain their products directly to entertainers and other recognizable guests. A product arrives with somebody capable of answering questions about it. That changes the encounter from receiving an object to meeting the person or team responsible for bringing it into the room.
In March 2014, the company described its approach as something resembling a trade show. Businesses reserved space and made displays; invited guests moved among them. Event photographs and video were part of the proposition, giving exhibitors material they could use afterward. The party had paperwork, deliverables and a client on the other side of the table.
“At the end of the day these gifting suites are for the clients, not the celebrities.”
Evan Foster, Celebrity Connected brand manager, 2014
That sentence puts Sheynis’s business in focus. The famous guest attracts attention, while the exhibitor needs something useful from the meeting. The organizer has to accommodate both. A celebrity can leave with a gift; a small business has paid for a chance to explain itself. Those are different reasons to enjoy the same afternoon.
A party with an emcee and a plan
By the September 2015 Emmys event, the mechanics were elaborate enough to include assistants checking arrivals, handlers helping guests with bags and photographs, and an emcee announcing names. Photographers met people as they entered. The apparent informality of wandering from booth to booth rested on a rather formal system for getting everyone inside.
The merchandise offered its own entertainment. There were cupcakes from Crumbs, Taiwanese tea from Tea Ave, juice from Pura Fruta and handblown glass among the products on display. Guests included Keegan-Michael Key, Jason Alexander and Samira Wiley. For a small exhibitor, that put ordinary questions about taste, texture or use into an unusual social setting.
Sheynis’s role as founder sits behind this arrangement of people and practicalities. Somebody has to sell the exhibition space, coordinate the occasion and make the promised encounter possible. The camera catches the meeting. The work also includes everything required to keep that meeting from becoming a guest standing alone beside a table of uncollected samples.
Anyone who has attended a crowded reception knows the distinction between being admitted and being introduced. An invitation solves the first problem. A host can help solve the second. The staffed, photographed and announced arrivals at Celebrity Connected made that distinction physical: access came with a route through the occasion, rather than simply an open door.
Celebrity Connected · An event room
Sportamix · An online network
Leave room for the root beer
The 2017 pre-Academy Awards suite returned to the Millennium Biltmore. Sheynis was identified there as CEO and executive producer, a pairing of titles that fits the work: a business to run and an event to put on. The programme mixed fashion, accessories, food and charities, rather than giving the floor to one product category.
Route 66’s Root Beer shared the broader offering with tea, hot sauce, jewelry and boots. Express Workforce Foundation and Feed A Billion were among the participating charities. The invitation might say luxury, but the inventory could be wonderfully domestic. Hollywood, on this occasion, had room for nachos. A ballroom can sustain only so much solemnity in the presence of snacks.
That variety matters to a profile of the organizer. The events bring together businesses with very different things to explain. A drink can be sampled, an accessory tried, a charitable programme discussed. Their common requirement is a visitor willing to stop. The organizer assembles the setting; each exhibitor has to make use of the pause.
The calendar also reached beyond the Oscars and Emmys. On May 6, 2017, Celebrity Connected held a gifting suite honoring the MTV Movie & TV Awards at the W Hotel in Hollywood. Exhibitors included Hug Life, Sweetopia and Django Moccasins. The change of venue and awards occasion gave the company another setting for its format. For Sheynis, the executive producer title belonged to work that could be repeated across occasions, with a different mix of products and visitors each time.
In March 2018, the Canadian charity Gems for Gems offered another account of what those pauses could produce. Founder Jordan Guildford said her team had hoped for photographs and supportive videos at the Oscar gift suite. She reported coming away with those, plus contact information from more than 25 celebrities willing to discuss working together afterward.
For the charity, the useful souvenir was a way to continue a conversation. The photographs still mattered, but so did the names behind them. It is an example of a participant defining value in terms of future contact. A gifting suite can contain several kinds of ambition without requiring everyone to leave carrying the same measure of success.
Celebrity contacts reported by Gems for Gems after its 2018 visit.A participant’s account of one event.
Then the introduction became the product
Sportamix brings a second business into Sheynis’s story. He is listed among its co-founders alongside Anthony Frolov, Bojan Mise and Dmitry Shats, and as its co-founder and CEO. Its stated purpose is direct communication among athletes, coaches, recruiters and fans. In this setting, the person looking for attention might be an athlete rather than a product maker.
The platform’s ambition extends across geography and social circumstances: athletes should be able to be discovered wherever they come from. That is a description of what Sportamix set out to enable. The underlying question is readily understood. Having something to show and reaching somebody able to assess it are separate steps, whether the evidence is a product demonstration or sporting ability.
The Sportamix connection also gives the Biltmore introduction its context. Sheynis was bringing a visitor to a platform in which he had a founding role. Steinberg, whom she met there, is also listed as a Sportamix adviser. The sports conversation was part of the same occasion that had drawn people together around television’s awards weekend.
By August 2019, Sheynis appeared in the episode listings of the Ministry of Sport podcast, a series devoted to the business of sport. The appearance places him in another professional conversation beyond the gifting suite. His work could be encountered through an event in Los Angeles, a sports platform or a discussion aimed at people working in that industry.
Put the two ventures beside each other and the shared subject is access. Celebrity Connected organizes face-to-face encounters. Sportamix describes a network through which sporting participants can find one another. The setting changes, along with the people seeking an audience. The practical challenge remains recognizable: making it easier for the relevant people to come into contact.
The distance across a ballroom
Sheynis’s professional interests also appear in smaller, less ceremonial ways. His LinkedIn activity includes reshared material about shortening meetings and understanding different kinds of team members. These are modest details beside a red carpet, but recognizably part of an operator’s working world. Even a business built around introductions eventually has a meeting that could use fewer minutes.
The most revealing scene remains the one at the Biltmore. A visitor arrived, Sheynis pointed her toward a booth, and an interview followed. The sequence contains no elaborate theory of influence. It has a specific person doing a specific piece of hosting, in a room assembled to make encounters possible.
Fame gives a gifting event its spectacle. The smaller action is what makes Sheynis interesting: moving a conversation from possible to actual. In 2018, that meant introducing a writer to a sports platform and an agent. Across a ballroom full of things being offered, he had one more thing to offer: somebody she should meet.