When Bad Bunny walked onto the stage at San Juan’s Estadio Hiram Bithorn in December 2021 for his P FKN R shows, it marked not just his return to live performance after the pandemic shutdown, but also the beginning of one of the most important creative partnerships in modern touring. Behind those elaborate sets, video design and staging was STURDY., a Los Angeles-based production house founded by creative director Adrián Martínez and brothers Kevin and Tyler Henry.

STURDY. has since become the go-to team for some of Latin music’s most ambitious live productions. Over the past five years, the company has helped Bad Bunny mount everything from award show spectacles to one of the biggest global tours of the decade. And in 2025, STURDY. helped Rauw Alejandro more than double his previous touring numbers with a high-concept production that grossed $117.3 million.

From freelancing to founding STURDY.

Martínez, 36, spent the mid-2010s doing freelance gig work alongside the Henry brothers. It was a period of professional independence, but also frustration. “We’re never going to work with the top artists in the world if we’re just freelancing,” he remembers telling his partners. “We need to create some momentum for this thing we’re creating.”

That momentum became STURDY., launched in 2018. The name is a nod to the idea that a show’s foundation has to be solid. But the company was born as much out of a negative experience as a creative vision. “There was a lot of middlemanning,” Martínez says. “The middlemen in those situations were not understanding what it was that the artist wanted, and my goal is always just to understand what it is they want and help elevate that.”

The direct-to-artist approach proved to be a winning one. Rather than filtering creative decisions through layers of agency representatives, STURDY. positioned itself as a creative partner that could translate an artist’s instincts into physical and digital worlds. That philosophy, applied to some of the biggest names in music, has turned a small production outfit into an industry force.

Bad Bunny’s world-building

STURDY.’s relationship with Bad Bunny began in 2020, when the company worked on an Apple Music performance by the Puerto Rican superstar. That project served as a calling card. When Bad Bunny’s team began planning his first shows since the shutdown, they reached out to STURDY. to help assemble the P FKN R concerts at San Juan’s Estadio Hiram Bithorn in late 2021.

That two-night event, produced by Noah Assad Presents and Move Concerts, cost over $10 million to stage. It was a statement of intent: Bad Bunny was back, and live music was ready to reach new levels of production value. “They needed a tent team, so we reconnected and the rest is history,” Martínez says.

From there, STURDY. became an integral part of Bad Bunny’s touring machine. The company worked on his 2022 treks El Último Tour del Mundo and World’s Hottest Tour, both of which played to massive audiences around the globe. It also designed his performances at the 2023 Grammy Awards and Coachella, translating his studio aesthetic to some of the most-watched stages in the world.

In 2025, Bad Bunny took on an even more ambitious challenge: a 21-date residency, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, at San Juan’s José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum. The residency was billed as a love letter to Puerto Rico, and STURDY. helped create a multi-sensory experience that celebrated the island’s culture, music and landscapes.

The company then moved on to the DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS tour, a 57-show run that ended July 22. That tour made history as the highest-grossing and best-selling tour ever to not play the United States. Touring industry data shows Bad Bunny has now grossed more than $1 billion across his career — the first Latin artist and the first artist who doesn’t perform in English to do so.

That milestone is a validation of the philosophy Martínez laid out when STURDY. was founded. “What we’re seeing a lot more of,” he says, “is artists caring about executing and building their world on a much greater scale than we’ve ever seen before.”

Rauw Alejandro comes calling

Bad Bunny isn’t the only Puerto Rican superstar in STURDY.’s orbit. In 2022, Rauw Alejandro reached out to the company directly via Instagram. He was looking for a team to help elevate his live show, and STURDY. answered the call.

Their first collaboration was Alejandro’s performance at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas. That led to the Saturno tour, a visually ambitious production that helped establish Alejandro as one of Latin music’s most exciting live performers. STURDY. also worked with him on assorted festival appearances, refining what would become the aesthetic of his 2025 tour.

That tour, Cosa Nuestra, arrived in 2025 as a high-concept production that drew on the album’s genre-blurring sound. It grossed $117.3 million and sold 869,000 tickets across its run — more than double Alejandro’s previous career best. For Martínez, the partnership is more than just a business relationship. “There’s a lot of creative respect there and I love his music. I’m very lucky to be able to work with artists that I actually listen to,” he says.

A three-headed monster

Looking forward, STURDY. wants to expand beyond pure touring. Martínez describes the company’s ambition as becoming “a three-headed monster,” with divisions covering creative direction and design in the live space, creative design for music and album campaigns, and a focus on experiential projects. The goal is to create immersive worlds across every touchpoint of an artist’s career.

That expansion comes as the live entertainment industry faces a moment of both pressure and possibility. Fans are paying more for tickets and expecting more from their experiences. The challenge of delivering on those expectations falls to production companies like STURDY., which have to constantly push the boundaries of technology, storytelling and scale.

For Martínez, the core mission remains unchanged: listen to the artist, understand what they want, and build it. “My goal is always just to understand what it is they want and help elevate that,” he says. The enormous success of Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro’s recent tours suggests that this approach is not just creatively satisfying, but commercially viable. As STURDY. expands into new areas, it will carry that philosophy with it, helping artists create worlds that are bigger, bolder and more immersive than anything they’ve done before.

Source: Billboard News