A Blueberry Farm, a Tour Bus, and a Successful Startup: Dre Wallace’s First Gig
by Ryan Brown
You’ve held the finished product a hundred times. A plastic pint of blueberries, stacked under the fluorescent lights at Meijer, three bucks, into the cart, never a second thought. What you don’t see is everything behind it: the fields, the crates, the sorting line, the dozens of hands that touched each berry before it ever got near your kid’s snack tray.
Dre Wallace has seen all of it. She was one of those hands.
Today, Dre is the co-founder and CEO of Opnr, a platform reinventing how live music gets booked, connecting venues, promoters, and festivals with the right local and regional artists, and using fan data to help everyone sell more tickets. It runs on a simple, slightly radical idea: the people who make the magic happen shouldn’t be the ones losing money. But when she sat down with me on My 1st Gig, we didn’t start with the startups or the tours or the data. We started in a warehouse outside South Haven, with a 14-year-old behind the wheel of a Gator.
All Hands on Deck
Dre’s parents didn’t want her to get a job. Focus on school, they told her. She begged anyway — all her friends were landing summer gigs, and she wanted one too. So she ended up at a blueberry farm, where, in classic rural-Michigan fashion, a 14-year-old was promptly handed the keys to a piece of farm equipment.
She started by driving the Gator out to the fields and hauling crates of berries back to the line. Then she worked the line itself, pulling out the green ones, the leaves, the stray bits of bush, so only the good berries made the tidy little pints. Because she’d grown up speaking Spanish, she also became the translator between the owners and the migrant workers who came up from Mexico each summer. “All hands on deck,” is how she described it.
It was, by her own account, a blast. Summertime, outside, friends, new faces every season. But the lesson underneath the fun stuck: she learned what teamwork actually costs, and she never looked at food the same way again. To this day, she washes everything from the store — she knows exactly how many hands it took.
Two Trains Running
For most of Dre’s life, her career has looked like two trains running side by side. On one track: a corporate, button-up world. On the other: music. She’s classically trained on piano and saxophone, and somewhere along the way, almost by accident, she became a touring DJ and producer. (You may know her as Super Dre.)
The timing was lucky. As the MySpace era gave way to SoundCloud and Instagram, the tools to put your music in front of the world suddenly belonged to everyone. Dre put hers out there, people started booking her, and managers started calling. One of the smartest moves she ever made, she says, was listening to her parents: study music, sure — but get a business degree too. Because in the end, “it’s all business.”
Nothing taught her that faster than the road. Her first big tour was three weeks of dates down south, and she spent it watching how the money moved, why some nights ended with a clean check and others with an envelope of cash. The industry, she learned, is gloriously messy and runs on very few rules. And the show that launched that whole chapter happened right here in Grand Rapids, at The Intersection, where she moved a ton of tickets and stumbled onto the thing Opnr is now built on: a local artist can light up a crowd in a way even the headliner can’t.
Learning to See the Data
Her first job out of college was just down the street in McKay Tower, as a project manager at a software firm. She wasn’t a coder by training, but she got dangerously good at Excel and started pouring her own touring numbers into tools like Tableau until she could see exactly where her fans were and where she should play next.
Then her musician friends started asking: "Can you make me one of those?” That question became her first startup, Fortify — a way to hand artists the data to make their own decisions. An accelerator in Detroit followed, and by the end of 2019 she was ready to launch.
Then COVID hit, and live music stopped cold. But the pause is what made Opnr possible. A well-timed introduction connected Dre with a founder whose live-experience platform had gone quiet, and they stitched their companies together, her data, his vision for the live side, and by 2022, they were running.
Letting the Two Lives Meet
Somewhere around 2018, Dre had an epiphany: she was tired of living a double life. The corporate Dre and the music Dre had spent years carefully avoiding each other. “They need to be friends,” she decided. Opnr is what that friendship looks like.
Making the leap was terrifying. Golden handcuffs traded for what she cheerfully calls “winging it.” It takes a real belief in yourself, the kind you build by showing up for yourself over and over. “I’m sweating, I’m crying in the bathroom,” she laughed, “but it’s going to be okay.” Her advice for anyone eyeing the same jump comes down to two questions: why do you want to do this, and what do you want your life to look like? Get honest about both, and the rest of the decisions get a lot clearer.
Which brings us back to the blueberry. The thing you enjoy without thinking — a great night out, a band you’ll remember — only exists because somebody did the unglamorous work to make it possible. Dre has spent her whole career on that side of the line. Lucky for the rest of us, she likes it there.