Daisy Chain Fields was conceived as an ambitious, cause-driven celebration, patterned after Lilith Fair and curated by Olivia Rodrigo with an entirely female lineup at Great Park in Irvine, California. On paper, the late August event looked like a massive charitable success, gathering performers like Chappell Roan, Bikini Kill, Doechii, and Garbage while pulling in twenty million dollars for women and girls. Rodrigo had launched the effort with an initial ten million dollar pledge to a slate of non-profit organizations, among them Planned Parenthood, Baby2Baby, the National Women’s Law Center, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the Center For Reproductive Rights, FreeFrom, and the Johns Hopkins Center For Indigenous Health. Behind the scenes, however, at least one independent merchant experienced a starkly different reality.
Mary Chacon, the owner of a bakery called Ugly Oats Kitchen, outlined those troubles in an open letter addressed to Rodrigo on Instagram. Two days after the gates closed, Chacon reached out to both the singer and festival management after discovering that her business had still not been paid its festival sales. She characterized the failure to distribute the money as a breach of contract. Speaking up carried clear risks, and Chacon acknowledged that she had initially paused out of concern that going public might harm her business, yet felt left with no other way to get an answer from organizers.
The financial burden had started accumulating well before anyone arrived in Irvine. Organizers warned food vendors that running out of supplies during the day would result in fines. Hoping to avoid penalties, Ugly Oats Kitchen shut down its daily bakery operations and spent days turning out thousands of cookies to ensure shelves remained stocked. Merely securing a spot on the field required roughly 1,400 dollars in vendor fees, accompanied by an agreement to hand over thirty-five percent of all sales to the festival. Last-minute mandatory purchases mandated by organizers compounded the problem, pushing the small business into a deficit of several thousand dollars.
Matters grew worse once the physical operation got underway. Setup details arrived only a few hours ahead of the scheduled call time, sparking long entry delays for merchants trying to access the Great Park site. Once customers poured in, Chacon found her booth largely stranded. Foot traffic trickled past, and visitors told the bakery crew that they had no idea food was even on offer in that corner of the grounds. Chacon also pointed out what looked like flawed planning on the part of DLS, noting that management appeared to book an overabundance of dessert stands while skimping on vendors selling substantial meals.
The operational disarray quickly became a physical concern for the workers staffing the stall. Chacon noted that staff members received no directions toward basic drinking water or food resources. In the heat, one of her team members suffered heat exhaustion, vomited, and was unable to track down an adequate meal. Chacon remembered the afternoon as the most miserable day she and her employees had ever spent together, estimating that digging out from the financial hole will require months of regular business.
Her letter was not entirely devoid of warmth. Chacon took care to thank Rodrigo personally, explaining that the singer's music had carried her through hard periods in her life, and she credited the festival team with creating a safe atmosphere for fans. Still, she could not ignore the contradiction between the festival's mission and its treatment of independent workers. Raising twenty million dollars to champion women, she noted, felt hollow when it came at the literal expense of female entrepreneurs trying to make a living on the festival grounds.
