Fashion Palette

When Sonya from Fashion Palette approached me late last year to be a guest speaker on the Fashion Palette 2 day conference in Sydney, I was very honored. The amazing presentation she sent me was the clincher in making the decision to commit to the event. Her organization, planning and the level at which she wished to produce this event was exceptional.

So off I went to Sydney in late April early May for the 2 day fashion feast incorporating Mimco, Insight, Instyle, Alpha 60, Peter Morrissey, White Sands amongst others. A huge crowd of students and fashionistas filled the auditorium ready to listen, absorb, be inspired and learn from the various speakers.

I spent quite some time preparing my speech as I have attended many seminars and felt that there is a real art to bridging the gap between been a boring, exciting, informative, funny and helpful keynote speaker. So I wanted to ensure I didn't just talk about stylehunter.com too much and explain where I came from, experiences I had that had led me to creating stylehunter.com and about the online fashion space in general.

I get quite the rush from public speaking, so enjoyed this experience immensely. I was fortunate to have some great personal feedback about my presentation and had many people follow up with tweets and emails as a result.

Highlights for me personally were learning more about Cathryn Wills from Mimco (I missed working with Cathryn when I was at Mimco) and Kate from Instyle magazine as well as learning about the daily life of the "Insight" boys.

Major kudos to Sonya and Crystelle for having an idea, making it happen and executing it brilliantly.

Thanks to Love Jungle for the lend of the photo of me. Check them out.

stylehunter.com

I co-created stylehunter.com under the Catalogue Central company in 2007. For 6 months I researched the place of online fashion domestically and internationally and learnt about navigation and what makes a website memorable. I then met with a variety of "fashionistas" in Australia who gave their learned opinion about our potential website with valuable feedback. We launched stylehunter.com in September 2007.

I was handling all aspects of stylehunter - concepts, branding, marketing, art direction, editing, working with our tech, production and operations team and handling the budgets etc as well as the sales side. A big role to undertake and one that has taught me a tremendous amount. I became brand manager and editor and guided stylehunter to become a memorable, carbon neutral, online fashion magazine.

I left stylehunter in April 2009 and was still freelancing for them editing the weekly e-newsletter "VIP STYLE" until recently and my last monthly magazine was the "May issue". Stylehunter.com will be taking on a different format and becoming a quarterly magazine which will be outsourced from the Catalogue Central (now CC Media) team.