A ten-day build. 3,200 items on hire. No room for error for GemFest.

Ten days. That’s how long GemFest has to turn 70 acres of Wiltshire countryside into a festival site for 8,000 people.

The team has to get 3,200 individual hire items onto the grounds of Charlton Park Estate: 2,500 Heras fence panels stretching five miles, steel crowd barriers, canteen tables and chairs, and everything else a festival of this size demands. Then four days of live music. Then four days to remove it all in a de-rig that takes 16 trucks to clear the site.

There’s no long build programme to absorb delays here. Miss a delivery and there’s no second chance. Miss the de-rig schedule and the event organiser faces fines. Something will always go wrong on a greenfield build. The question is never whether the problem gets solved, it’s whether it gets solved today.

From a birthday party to a festival

GemFest started in 2023 as a 350-person birthday party in a field. By 2026 it had grown to 8,000 attendees, with a build and de-rig operation that scales with it every year.

For most of that growth, GemFest sourced everything through a single hire company, limited to whatever that supplier held across its own network of around 40 depots. That worked until the festival outgrew what a single supplier could offer. Orders often needed pulling together from multiple different depots, some far from site, taking three to five days to arrive. Half of the build schedule was gone before the kit had even left the depot.

Through YardLink, that network grew from around 40 depots to over 2,400, backed by more than 1,000 suppliers. GemFest still deals with one team. But behind that team is access to every local supplier. Deliveries that used to take three to five days now arrive the same day or next.

“It’s so much easier having access to lots of different plant hire companies through a single portal. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fence panel or a forklift, someone in the network has it close by. I’m still speaking to one team, I just don’t have to worry about what they’ve actually got in stock and how quickly it’s going to arrive.”
Sam Morgan, Co-Founder and Operations Director, GemFest

When the clock was running out

Late in the build, a hydraulic breaker was needed urgently, with the nearest depot due to shut within the hour.

“I rang Josh at 5pm. He said the closest supplier shut at 5:30pm. He told me if I could drive up there now and pick it up, it’s done. He just sorted it, and it was that easy.”
Sam Morgan, Co-Founder and Operations Director, GemFest

Within 30 minutes of the call, the hydraulic breaker was collected. That’s the difference a local supplier network makes when everything is on the line.

One view of everything coming and going

The hydraulic breaker call was the visible crisis. The quieter risk is the one that never gets a phone call: not knowing what’s on site, what’s due back, and when. YardLink gives GemFest one calendar view of every order, across every supplier, so nothing slips through unnoticed.

“It’s great to have access to a portal that shows you in real-time what’s on-hire, what’s off-hired versus what’s been ordered and what you’re expecting. It’s very clear and simple.”
Sam Morgan, Co-Founder and Operations Director, GemFest

For GemFest’s team, that same consistency carries through to the paperwork. Every quote, delivery note and invoice looks the same, no matter which supplier provided the kit. No hunting through inboxes to work out who sent what. No back-and-forth over what was ordered versus what turned up on site. Just one paper trail, in one place.

The margin that never moves

When the gates open to the public on a specific date, whether the festival is ready or not, a reliable supply chain isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential. Across the 2026 build, GemFest got exactly that: a 100% delivery success rate and zero days lost to the schedule. No missed deliveries, no missed collections, no delays. The event has grown every year, the build gets bigger and the logistics more complex, and the margin for error stays exactly the same.

“We’re already looking ahead to next year. When you’ve got ten days and no room for things to go wrong, you need a supplier network you can actually rely on. That’s what we’ve got with YardLink.”
Sam Morgan, Co-Founder and Operations Director, GemFest

If you would like to find out how YardLink can support your event, call us on 0330 808 8897.