Festival Launch Morning Tea

Public launch of the NRA Australian Fashion Design Festival presented by Pacific Fair Shopping Centre

Eva Milic hosted the public launch together with NRA Australian Fashion Design Award judges Michael Pherous (Chair), Trelise Cooper and Jonathan Ward, to introduce the Festival to the shopping public.

The inaugural and limited-edition Variety Chari-Tees, designed by some of Australia and New Zealand’s leading fashion designers, will be paraded on the catwalk along with a short parade of Pacific Fair’s chic winter collections.

This year there were two main fashion events which I was hoping to cover here on my website, the EKKA Coffee Club parades and the Mercedes Benz fashion festival.

Unfortunately I was not permitted a media pass to either events as this site isn’t classified by PR or marketing companies as a “bona-fide” media outlet. It amazes me the ignorance of so called “marketing” companies to deny the channel of independent internet publications. Is there not a market for selling the EKKA or Fashion online?

There is a misconception that internet websites/blogs are not an important enough channel to consider them individually to allow to document the event. I’ve documented a fair wack of fashion events and the EKKA previously which is still getting a lot traffic. Most notable was my documentation of the NRA Fashion award finals last year, QUT graduate parades, MSIT graduate parades, plus several other key events in Brisbane. Not only did I document them, but i’ve generated a lot of traffic for those event websites. Try searching for the following keywords in google typically I rank in the top 5.

“nra fashion parade”
“qut fashion parade”
“msit fashion parade”

Most fashion labels I have documented have also benefit from my internet marketing skills, where in some instances my article post about their label ranks higher than their company site for their label name search term.

Here are some traffic stats:

• During the month of July, I had a total 49,707 unique visitors to christianbowman.com.
• More than 17,397 of those visitors landed on my site searching for EKKA or Fashion related content.
• July was a fairly uneventful month in terms of online fashion and EKKA traffic. If I was to use the percentages from the EKKA and fashion season last year where that traffic was at 65%, then I could forecast that during the same season this year I would reach attract over 32,000 unique visitors.

Also note that whilst July was a high traffic month, it isn’t out of the ordinary, i’ve had steady growth over the year, during June this site attracted 43,087 unique visitors.

So my point is, how can anyone in the fashion industry not have me document them when traffic and leads are abundant on this site. I even have a large subscriber base on this site, I know the names of the people who look at my site, I value their support for the EKKA and Fashion events and so should the event organisers!

Anyways, even though I’m a bit disappointed in being restricted in documenting key events in Brisbane, I am still keen supporter of the EKKA and the EKKA fashion parades.

I would hate to see them disappear in the future as organisers refuse to do something different in marketing the event.

Here are the details – ONE DAY TO GO!

Brisbane EKKA
RNA Showgrounds – August 9-18, 2007

Gregory Terrace
Bowen Hills
Brisbane Qld 4006

Ph: 07 3852 1831
Email: enquiries@ekka.com.au