About Styx and Stones
Some events are forgotten before the car park empties. We build the ones people are still talking about a year later.
Styx and Stones Events is a creative production studio led by Claire Tester, a senior event producer with 17+ years of experience across large-scale conferences, immersive corporate experiences, cultural festivals, and community programmes. We work with organisations who understand that an exceptional event isn't just a logistics exercise — it's a designed experience with the power to shift culture, build community, and change how people see themselves and each other.
We don't have a permanent team. We have a permanent philosophy, and a network of exceptional specialists — designers, artists, facilitators, technologists, producers — who we assemble around each brief. That means every project gets exactly the expertise it needs, without the overhead of people who don't.
What we've built
We've produced Australia's premier innovation conference for 345,000 attendees. We've built immersive leadership experiences for 4,200 PwC employees that earned a +99.5 NPS and a Mumbrella CommsCon Award. We've created the annual programme that connects Australia's deep tech founders with their investors, 40% of whom secured funding after appearing on our stage. We've produced cultural experiences for Atlassian's global distributed workforce across three continents simultaneously. And we've built the kind of agency retreats that a 15-year events veteran calls the best they've ever attended.
We work across corporate events, conferences, festivals, community programmes, and brand activations — wherever the brief calls for something that can't be templated.
Claire Tester — Founder & Senior Producer
Claire has spent 17 years at the intersection of large-scale event production and human-centred experience design. Most recently Senior Conference Producer at SXSW Sydney, she has led events for SXSW, PwC, Atlassian, Thinkerbell, Cicada Innovations and Innovation Bay. She brings operational rigour, creative instinct, and a genuine belief that the best events don't feel like events at all — they feel like something that happened to you.