The Milwaukee Brewers are jumping on a league-wide trend of ballparks adding premium, all-inclusive clubs tied to the most desirable seats in the house.

At American Family Field, those are the 375 seats in the six rows behind home plate, including a new row of seats that will be added on to what is now the warning track. Tickets to those seats will come with access to the Truss Club, a two-story, 20,000-square-foot, all-inclusive gathering space set to debut at the start of the 2027 baseball season. The structure is currently under construction outside of the right field corner of American Family Field. When finished, it will open onto the field level concourse of the stadium.

The club, announced earlier this month, brings American Family Field in line with a model that has become commonplace across Major League Baseball as teams look to create new revenue opportunities while meeting growing demand for elevated and all-inclusive game-day experiences. In a recent interview with BizTimes, Brewers chief operating officer Marti Wronski said the Truss Club and the new UW Credit Union Plaza – opening Friday along the southeast side of the ballpark behind center field – together represent the largest fan-facing investment at the stadium since it opened in 2001 and discussed the research, fan insights and business strategy behind the projects.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

BizTimes: How did the idea behind the Truss Club come about? I know keeping in touch with fans and sourcing feedback from fans is something that the Brewers do all the time. Was this directly related to fan feedback, or did this come from somewhere else?

Wronkski: “It’s always a combination of factors. Part of our job, frankly, is to always have our eye on what’s happening across pro sports both in terms of facilities and all the components of this business: what’s happening from an employee perspective, a fan perspective, a ticket perspective, a facility perspective. So, across all of pro sports, what’s happening within Major League Baseball, and what are our fans here locally telling us about what they want, what they love, what they don’t like, et cetera. And what fans say they want, isn’t necessarily consistent with behavior, and so we also measure actual behavior and then line all those things up. And we do this constantly, again, to A. make sure we’re relevant and in the mix at all times and B. to generate new ideas. What are others doing, and is there a way we could be doing it here?

“In this particular situation, we had a number of data points. We had our own data collected through our strategy and analytics group here at the club, where we were seeing fans saying consistently that – and we’re definitely seeing this from a behavior perspective as well – the fans are really leaning into the all-inclusive experiences right now. Both slightly more premium and the sort of everyday, all-inclusive experiences. I think it’s more convenient. I think it’s more predictable. You can come out, you know that you’ve paid for a space, you bring your group, or you know that your ticket and your food is covered. We’re just seeing that more and more frequently here at our ballpark, so we’ve measured that in behavior.

“We also got that in terms of fan feedback. Add to that, we were seeing more and more fan feedback saying, ‘Gosh, we just wish you had that one level up experience. We’re going to other ballparks, and there are these clubs that you can go to. How come we don’t have that in Milwaukee?’ We were also keeping track of our research, across the league and across leagues, and these higher-end clubs that are associated with quote-unquote, ‘the best seats in the house,’ those seats, in our case, right behind home plate. Those kinds of membership clubs have absolutely taken on a life of their own. In fact, in baseball, we right now are one of only two clubs that don’t have one of these clubs.

“We had our eye on this starting about five years ago but with all the legislation and all the other things going on, there were a couple projects that necessarily paused a bit. In the last several years, a litany of ballparks have added these clubs and are finding them to be an incredibly successful. We try at all times to have something for everyone, literally. You study your fan base in all these different ways, and the first message we got across the board loud and clear was all-inclusive. Then we checked across baseball and across pro sports, and it was absolutely something we’re seeing. We had to check then … what is the likelihood of people being willing to spend? What is the likelihood that this will actually be an effective opportunity here for us?

“That information was coming back very positive. So then we started our on-the-ground research; this was more than a year in the making, we got this data, we had a sense that we needed to do one of these clubs. So, we really started traveling and talking to our counterparts, not just in baseball, but across a lot of pro sports. Basketball’s got a lot of these. We visited and looked at the spaces and food and locations, and all of this while we were doing feasibility studies here at the ballpark, trying to decide what is best, knowing that if you’re gonna create one of these clubs, accessibility is everything, and there have to be amenities. You can’t go put this in some random place high up in the rafters and think that it’s gonna get the kind of response that you’re looking for.

“We really did a lot of this research because it can’t be cookie cutter. You really have to understand your fan base and focus on your fan base and how do you take this concept and adjust it to fit. And some of it’s geographical. If we were located in a place, like Atlanta or Arizona that’s 110 degrees all summer long, you’re not gonna have the beautiful indoor-outdoor element that our particular club is going to have. But if you’re in Wisconsin and the only months you have to be outside are the summer months, the baseball season, you’re gonna do everything in your power as a business to let fans experience baseball in sort of this beautiful indoor/outdoor setting that is also quite close (to the field). A lot of these (clubs) are underground, right underneath the seats, and we just couldn’t see doing that with our fan base. I mean, who wants to spend two hours before a game underground in the dark when they could be out in a space that is lots of windows or outdoor patios?

“This was a long time coming. There was a ton of work that went into this, but it really is one of those things that rose because all of our different data points and data sources, so globally, you know, top of the funnel all the way down to the fan themselves were saying, ‘Yes, we want this.’ And so then from there it was a matter of, ‘OK, what does this look like here in Milwaukee?’

You talked about segmenting of fans. Which fans are the ones asking for these all-inclusive experiences?

“Our segments of fans, the way we’ve done it traditionally is you’ve got everything from your ‘Diehard Dannys’ to your ‘Tailgate Tammys’ … Tammy likes the fun. She has FOMO. She wants to be around, but we’re finding other ways to entertain Tammy. Diehard Danny just wants to be able to watch the game. And there’s many segments in between these, right? There’s also the segments of people that are never gonna watch a game. I kinda just count them out. … But everybody else I want to have something for.

“Generally, your diehards, they don’t wanna be distracted. They want to just watch this game. They love the information and the data and the purity of the game. So they like a different kind of all-inclusive space than Tammy does. And then you’ve got your diehards who are very focused on baseball, but because of that, they also love the history. They want the big screen, they want to be at the ballpark early, but you have to be sure that they can have access to baseball early, big screens and those kinds of things. So, you’ve got that kind of fan who isn’t going to want to be on a social deck where they’re going to get distracted or whatever else. But boy, they might want an all-inclusive where it’s really so much about baseball. Flip side, you’ve got a Tammy who doesn’t want to miss out, but wants a really nice experience …  versus the Tammy who’s coming out for a bachelorette party, which we have all-inclusives for all of these.

“So, not only have we segmented our fan, but then within the fan, everybody’s interested in the all-inclusive as long as we have an all-inclusive that allows them to still behave in the way their segment would suggest. So, if I’m a diehard, I don’t want to be, you know, stuck in a deck where I can’t see from the back, right? I want to be able to have a good view from wherever I am or have access to baseball, and then I want to be able to get out of there and go to my seat. So that’s where this club is really going to serve us.”

What segment of fan is the target market for the Truss Club?

“It truly is for the fan who wants the best view of the game, and that’s why this all-inclusive is a little different because it is the fans from dugout to dugout in the first six rows behind home plate, including that new front row that we’re building. It really is somebody that does care about their view of the game but also likes that additional experience. They want the easiness into the parking lots; they like to enjoy their game in a way that is simpler, they probably come quite regularly, so the nuance of coming and having that full tailgate experience, meeting up with tons of fans, that’s really not the way this fan enjoys their game. They want to park, they want to get right in. They might be coming right from work. So it’s great for them that they can bring in an additional briefcase or a laptop or whatever that might be, we’ve got those private storage lockers you may have seen in the renderings.

“Again, it’s an all-inclusive, but it’s for a fan who wants to enjoy the game a little bit differently. They want to be able to go to their seats. They don’t necessarily want to get up. It’s a fan who comes a lot. There’s gonna be different food opportunities all the time; the culinary experience really isn’t an experience in this club. And maybe they come one time as a date night, they come the next time with their family, they come the next time with a coworker, the next time with a client they’re trying to entertain. They see this space, they see this facility as a place that they love to experience and that it can be experienced in a lot of different ways.”

For the business consumer, can you see the Truss Club being a place for client or business group entertainment? Or do you think that may continue to exist more in the boxes and the premium suites just because there’s more capacity and accommodation for larger groups.

“It’ll depend. We’ve got the corporate folks who use those suites for a litany of reasons – sometimes it’s internal, and sometimes it’s external. But there’s other times that if you’re trying to have a one-on-one meeting with a small group or a two-on-one meeting with a client who’s in town and you want that background noise, you want that framework, I think that’s where (the Truss Club) and the seats might serve a better purpose. It’s not super easy to have a private conversation in the suites; there’s that other element that’s completely social, get to know you. But if you want to meet and have a serious meeting before the game and then go out and enjoy the game, I think the Truss will be perfect for that purpose.”

From a business perspective for the Brewers, how important is something like the Truss Club and other premium spaces in the ballpark to generating revenue and just the bottom line of the Brewers franchise?

“Everything is so interrelated, it’s all part of staying relevant to the consumer and constantly trying to evolve who we’re reaching and how we’re reaching them. We’re already seeing in the interest forms (24 hours since the announcement)… the interest forms we’re collecting are fascinating because a lot of these folks are fans that aren’t otherwise in our system, which tells me right now already that we’re missing something, that yet another group of people are interested in this space. While we treasure our current fans and we’re gonna serve them completely with this, it also means we’re continuing to reach and evolve and stay relevant as a business and that’s really where the relevance of spaces like this come into play.

“(The new UW Credit Union Plaza), while it is not a direct one-to-one revenue driver – you don’t pay to get into the plaza experience, you can come, play, gather – that is equally important because it is staying relevant. It’s making sure we’re attracting and serving a particular kind of consumer who, frankly at the end of the day, is looking for a fun place to come and gather and have an experience. So, all of these spaces are extremely important to us in terms of staying relevant, and being relevant necessarily translates to ticket sales and necessarily translates to revenue. It’s all related to what we have to do to make sure we continue to serve.

“Mind you, you can create the greatest space in a ballpark, or in any facility; if you don’t get it right, if you overprice it, if you don’t know your consumer, so you miss the mark, it’s an utter and complete failure. So, it’s important to get these spaces right to make sure that the research that’s going into them, to make sure that we’re not just looking at a club in California or even in Detroit and saying, ‘Ah, that. That’s exactly what we want.’ You can’t do that. That’s why these spaces and the ideation around them and the testing around them can take a little bit longer than one might think to get exactly right. You really get one shot on these spaces and I think we did a really good job getting it right.”

Maybe not California or Detroit, but were there certain ballparks that you did resonate more with as far as what you were looking to bring back to Milwaukee?

“I’m probably not gonna name specific names, but I will say this. We all learned something from every (ballpark we visited). The lovely thing about being a little bit later to build to one of these clubs is our counterparts have been out there doing this. They’ve been operating these spaces, some just built them. So we were able to sit with our counterparts at other clubs and say, ‘OK, what would you do differently here? What completely worked in terms of sales, in terms of how they structured the space? In terms of how they priced their spaces, in terms of decor, food choices?’ These meetings are hilarious. We covered everything from most serious business conversations to, ‘Is the pasta homemade or not?’ This is just what you do in baseball. Those conversations we learned so much from. So even though there are certain places, we needed to make this our own, we learned from every single club we talked to.”

How does the new UW Credit Union Plaza fit into the Brewers’ broader strategy of offering an all-inclusive experience to all the different fan segments?

“So when we started looking at the plaza, when we looked at the ballpark globally and we looked at every space there was, we found we had really great energy out on the (parking) lot. Our fans, they’re tailgating, they’re doing their thing. Even just the fans who aren’t tailgating, passing by the fans who are, there’s just a really great energy out there. We went from that to then you come up and you came up to the plaza area, which is that wide sidewalk that surrounds the whole ballpark, and it was a little desolate and dead, like there wasn’t much there. And it felt to so many of us as we looked at this, that the experience was interrupted, that you didn’t feel transported from the time you entered the lot until the time you sat in your seat. It felt like you were initially entering some joy, then it stopped, and then you found it again. The home had to restart when it came to the ballpark, and we really wanted to do something about that. We didn’t like that.

“So that’s where also our research was showing us, and you don’t really need research, you just need to be a mom of teenagers to figure this out. Because that tailgating culture, you know, I’d say to my boys, ‘Are you guys gonna tailgate?’ And they’d look at me like, ‘Yeah.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, great. The little grill is here.’ And they’d look at me, and they’re like, ‘Mom, we’re picking up pizzas, and they’ll be in our trunk, and we’re gonna pull them out in the parking lot.’ I was like, ‘That’s not tailgating.’ They’re like, ‘Well, yeah it is.’ It’s just a different generational kind of change. So between that sort of informal research and then some focus groups we did over time, we heard a lot of like, ‘OK, you love to tailgate, but why? What is it about tailgating?’ And over and over, (we heard it’s) the sense of community.

“When we looked at exactly what we wanted to do, we wanted there to be – even on that plaza – something for everyone. The part that is a little bit new that’s gonna be finished for 2027 is a food and beverage offering. It’ll have a rooftop deck that can be accessed by fans. It can also be rented by the public. So will the Truss Club on non-game days.

“And we looked at that as, you came to just enjoy the game. You didn’t bring the things to tailgate, but gosh, it would be great to make that pit stop, so that’s your tailgating spot. Then, as you move, it’s around the ballpark toward the Potawatomi gate, right when you come over the pedestrian bridge. Then as you continue to move along the plaza, the next thing you see is our beer garden. Whether you want to look at Estabrook Beer Garden, which is so beloved, or other beer gardens in Wisconsin, we know how to do a beer garden. And so, we did a music stage and a beer garden. We’ll have live music, sometimes we’ll have DJs out there. It’ll be a great way for us to really activate our theme nights and our community nights by doing themed music or whatever the case may be there. But again, just a place to sit with your family and have something to eat or drink before and meet up with people.

“And then next to that is our giant cow. … and that’s our true unique playground space … we didn’t just want to do another standard regular playground. We wanted this to really be different, and we wanted it to be a little bit more iconic in its Wisconsin nature and a little more artistic, frankly. The Brewers have really leaned into the nature of who are our fans and reaching the art community and partnering with them … through our mural projects and through some of the other projects we’ve done. We’ll have some ice cream truck kinds of things in that space for the kiddos to enjoy. And then next to that is a six-hole mini golf. And to us, again, that was full-family date night. Maybe not entertaining clients, but was taking a look at, what is iconically Wisconsin? And when you think about your Wisconsin summers, mini golf is one of those things that everybody does it. It’s just fun and simple.

“…It’s not just about the game. Yes, we love that our fans love the game, but it adds to the experience, and that’s what we’re gunning for over and over, is really helping create the fan experience.”