One of the biggest frustrations we've heard from event organizers is their difficulty in finding designers who can create high quality marketing material on a quick turn-around, with a tight budget.
No poster or banner image should be a hurdle for an event. For this reason, our team is excited to launch a new service: Bazaarboy Designs. We're making a commitment to help event organizers receive professional marketing materials in under 72 hours.
www.bazaarboy.com/designs
Our team of local St. Louis freelance designers can prepare a poster for $150 or a banner for $50, with three revisions.
The first clients to use this service have been: The Central West End Association, The Vino Gallery, and Froyo St. Louis.
Chalk The Loop invited accomplished artists and novices alike to create their own chalk masterpieces on the sidewalks of the Delmar Loop, designated "One of the 10 Great Streets in America" by the American Planning Association.
The 4th Annual Chalk Festival in The Loop featured the Largest Collaborative Chalk Mural in the Midwest to celebrate the 250th Birthday of St. Louis! Participants took part in the creation of the collaborative chalk mural by filling in a piece of the 20' x 30' Birthday Cake and becoming a part of St. Louis history!
Since launching our events platform we have met some amazing organizers along the way. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be starting a new series profiling local organizations and their events in the community.
Our first story comes from Tarek Elhage, owner of TheRekord, a social media platform that allows you to create a unique profile and share your favorite music with your friends.
Tarek is a graduate from Washington University in St. Louis with majors in Mathematics and Economics and plans on working towards a Master’s degree in Finance this coming year. He currently lives in University City and hosts exhilarating music events featuring live artists at local venues, like Blueberry Hill and Lumen. In the past, Tarek has collaborated with many local, national and international musicians, such as Amtrac, Goldroom, Franco-Hill and Drew Cooper, who performed live shows at his events.
All of Tarek’s events are hosted through TheRekord, which he started around two years ago, and focus mainly on the Washington University community. Through his events, Tarek hopes to extend his brand outwards from simply being a website to something impactful in the real world. At the core, he wants to take music that we really love and share it with everyone else. When asked about his goals, Tarek states that not only does he want to create a sharing platform for music, but also wants to help bring talented artists to the forefront and connect them with listeners.
"The biggest satisfaction is to have an artist come in to the event and have their music resonate with someone, even if it’s only one person,” he shares. “At the end of the day, it’s really about the experience with the music, the artist, and the audience. It’s an ephemeral experience that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Tarek also notes that TheRekord’s goals are maturing, in that they are looking to develop partnerships with music artists and create more original content. They want to attract users to their platform and also seek to become a niche in artists’ branding and marketing, in the sense that artists will perceive TheRekord as a unique, valuable tool for their music.
In terms of impacting the community, Tarek aims to add a touch of entertainment and fun to help enhance the college experience at Washington University. However, hosting events is pretty tough work as we listened to Tarek talk about his challenges.
“The hardest part is making people care about your event. I used to think that my passion and enthusiasm about the event would transfer to others, but often that’s not the case,” he tells us.
“You have to hit the sweet spot where people actually want to go to your event, and it’s a good enough deal to be worth it.” Tarek also discloses the biggest lesson he learned from being an event organizer: events are very volatile, and one event’s success doesn’t guarantee anything in the future.
Tarek acknowledges that there exist areas for improvement. “You have to be smart and learn from your mistakes,” he says. “We tried to host some events at new locations, but that didn’t work out. So we just stuck to doing events at venues that people are familiar with.”
Tarek touches on how establishing trust is a big factor in seeing who you can work well with. “You don’t have to fight an uphill battle,” he states. Moving forward, Tarek looks to expand his events to affect people outside the Washington University in the future through new partnerships.
How PR is Different (AND BETTER) for Social Enterprise
On May 21st, Kellee Sikes of P3 Strategies, Inc. organized a public event to discuss effective PR strategies for social enterprises. Hosted at Webster University, attendees learned how to turn products and services into newsworthy endeavors.
IndiHop represents independent neighborhoods celebrating independent breweries. Each year, The Grove and Cherokee Street unite for one amazing event! Guests taste up to 50 beers, receive an IndiHop glass, printed guide, and access to six shuttles traveling between the neighborhoods.
Jenny Nickerson attends Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO. She will graduate in December 2014 with a degree in Marketing & Communications. Thanks for all your hard work Jenny!
Purchase your ticket for the The Central West End Association Annual House Tour! Featuring five distinctive homes and gardens of the Central West End. www.thecwe.org
On May 1, 2014 the new TechArtista Collaborative Working Environment opened in St. Louis, MO. Bazaarboy was pleased to host the event registration and management for the evening that brought together entrepreneurs, students, activists, local businesses and community members. Bazaarboy is located in Suite 302 at TechArtista, so come visit us anytime!
Bazaarboy had the pleasure of partnering again with the Linus Foundation to host their annual fundraiser. Linus a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting fun, innovating programs that educate and empower children.
This year's event at Windows on Washington raised a significant amount of money for the Alberti Program in St. Louis, Missouri. Bazaarboy donated all service fees back to Linus in support of the foundation.
About Alberti:
The Alberti Program-Architecture for Young People is a problem-solving studio workshop about architecture, community, and the environment for fourth through ninth-grade students from St. Louis schools. Founded in 2006, the Alberti Program has introduced young students to the field of architecture, providing an opportunity to learn from lectures and to experiment with architectural design.
Startup Missouri is hosting a competition to send St. Louis entrepreneurs to SXSW for free! On Bazaarboy you can find an interactive event page for Startup Missouri that includes subsidized bus tickets and a video voting contest. Best of luck to all competitors!
Event details: www.bazaarboy.com/event/146/
Sponsors: STL Regional Chamber, SLU Center for Entrepreneurship, Accelerate STL & T-Rex/
Chinese Spring Festival Gala - ‘When East Meets West’
This weekend, the St. Louis Chinese Culture Center and the St. Louis Chinese Association are hosting a New Year Gala. This is a unique client for our team because we created a custom 'stadium-style' ticketing solution.
The 2014 Gala will feature traditional Chinese dances, vocal and musical instruments as well as unique performances by SLUH students. The show will be conducted by the professional directors and stage designers and performed by premier professional Chinese dancers and singers in collaboration with some of the most talented Chinese dance, musical instrument/vocal performers from the St. Louis area.
