Lord mayoral hopefuls Arron Wood and Erin Deering reveal plans to poach major events from other capital cities
Style mogul turned deputy lord mayoral hopeful Erin Deering has unveiled her bold plan to steal a major fashion event from Sydney to make Melbourne “better than it ever has been”.
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Style mogul turned deputy lord mayoral hopeful Erin Deering has unveiled bold plans to steal Australian Fashion Week from Sydney and bring the international event to Melbourne.
The Herald Sun can reveal Ms Deering and lord mayoral candidate Arron Wood would lead an “aggressive” campaign to entice more national and international events to Melbourne, if elected later this month.
Beyond Australian Fashion Week, they also have their sights set on the NRL Grand Final, the ARIA Awards, the World Science Festival, South by Southwest Sydney (SXSW) and the World CrossFit Games.
But Mr Wood and Ms Deering said they would consult with their “economic recovery taskforce” – chaired by Victorian Chamber of Industry and Commerce chief executive Paul Guerra – before locking in the events they wish to target.
Mr Wood said Melbourne needed to work harder to position itself as a destination of choice.
“Make no mistake — Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth are trying to steal some of the jewels in our major events crown and we need to fight back,” he said.
Ms Deering, an Australian entrepreneur, told the Herald Sun this was one of the election promises she was the most eager to launch.
“My sentiment about the city isn’t that it’s bust or that it’s broken,” she said.
“My sentiment is that we all need to get it, not back to where it was, but better than it ever has been.”
Australian Fashion Week is the country’s only international fashion trade event and attracts upwards of 24,000 attendees across five days, including international buyers, journalists, celebrities and influencers.
While on a smaller scale, Melbourne hosts its own Fashion Week in October as a consumer fashion event to drive retail traffic and sales in the city.
If elected, the pair said they would also prioritise the expansion of local events including Melbourne Fashion Week, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Melbourne Marathon and the Melbourne International Food and Wine Festival.
Ms Deering added that when it came to poaching events from other cities, the key was to “go direct” with Team Wood planning to leverage their contacts and relationships.
“I’m very fortunate in the sense that I’ve built extremely strong global relationships with people at fashion weeks all around the world,” she said.
Ten years ago, Ms Deering along with former partner Craig Ellis grew their cult swimsuit brand Triangl to a company valued at $US200m, recounting how the business was dreamt up on their second date at the beach.
“I was like I’ve got to find a bikini. I want to impress this guy,” she said.
“I ran around trying to find bikini, but I couldn’t find one. I got to the beach, told him that story … and he was like: ‘Well then, let’s make them’.”
The brand launched in Melbourne, but the pair decided to move to Hong Kong to give their business the best chance.
“We were really fortunate. We rode the Instagram wave really early and the brand became really successful within six months, which was amazing, but posed a whole bunch of other issues because it was just Craig and I,” she said.
“We couldn’t even take the time to hire anyone because we were so busy, trying to pack orders, trying to create the styles, trying to shoot the styles.”
Ms Deering, who turns 40 next week, became one of the richest young women in the country in 2015, but left Triangl one year later, saying she was “miserable deep down”.
“I was really isolated because we’d been away from Australia for so long,” she said.
“There’s not a single friend from Hong Kong or Monaco that I ever made.”
She was born in Melbourne but has lived in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, as well as overseas as Triangl grew. But for her, Melbourne will always be home.
“It’s an amazing city in a sense that it’s small enough to feel comfortable and almost like a community, but it’s big enough if you’re global,” she said.
“There’s not that many cities in the world that can do both.”
She said she was running for deputy lord mayor to “give back” to the city.
“This is not about me. This is about the City of Melbourne,” she said.
“I don’t care about my name being attached to that role. I don’t have any plans to jump into other levels of government … I want to go in, I want to do a good job and then I want to go back to my life at some point.”
But win or lose, Ms Deering said the election campaign had taught her so much, including that running for public office as a woman has its moments.
“You do get the questions and the scrutiny that men don’t get, like what you’re wearing and how you look,” she said.
“But to be honest, I just rise above those things. It doesn’t really affect me on a deep level at all, because I know who I am. I know why I’m doing this.”
Originally published as Lord mayoral hopefuls Arron Wood and Erin Deering reveal plans to poach major events from other capital cities
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