A boutique press and PR event for PROJE Tile clients in the niche luxury brand segment in collaboration with a new lifestyle-driven hospitality venue.
PROJECTile Presents @ Southam Street is good example of how PROJECTile takes the initiative to create opportunities relevant to its clients that reduce client costs in contrast to the traditional PR & press event approaches of most agencies.
We literally created it "the wrong way around". Knowing a number of our niche luxury brand clients require press and PR opportunities through relevant events, having identified Southam Street—a newly launched lifestyle-driven hospitality destination at the "wrong" end of Goldborne Road in west London—as open to collaborations, we set about exploring the possibilities.
PROJECTile worked with with Southam Street, first learning more about this newly launched venue in an area with low footfall for its target customers. Out of this, we proposed and agreed the basic terms of how the event would run.
Southam Street would host an event, making use of its upstairs venues and natty terrace to host product presentations by invited brands, all of them brands with which PROJECTile worked. PROJECTile then set about securing the participation of a carefully selection of these brands and briefing them on the event. And, of course, we opened our little black book, inviting a range of relevant press and influencers.
Unlike many other traditional PR approaches, the invitees also included decision makers on the retail side; people who could open new sales channels in keeping with our commitment to "presence".
Timed as an afternoon, workday press & PR invitation, culminating in delicious drinks and snacks laid on by Southam Street from its funky global fusion menus, the event for a professional audience segued into a more open one. Members of the public and the guests of invited media and retail professionals were invited to join in the early evening.
For some of PROJECTile's niche brands, Southam Street's burgeoning clientele were exactly the right people most likely to be interested in their offers. So, using a joined-up approach with Southam Street's own marketing people, what could have been an old-fashioned PR event where an individual client footed the bill, became something else: offering the venue's existing customers an extra reason to return; and PROJECTile's brand clients new eyeball and conversations.
Yes, it was certainly a jolly sundowner affair. But, in addition to the more obvious benefits of exposure to influencers and press, presenting brands benefitted from at least two other benefits. Firstly, some encountered people—"members of the public", if you will—who converted into clients. And secondly, some clients took advantage of the opportunity to develop real brand-to-brand contacts and conversations with brand owners they'd never met before, of importance in today's culture of collaborations between boutique luxury brands.