From Private Calendar to Public Platform

For years, I've kept a private calendar of events I wanted to attend. Whether I showed up or not, it was a helpful way to keep up with event producers, organizations, brands, and experiences as I navigated my pivot from commercial real estate marketing to fashion/beauty/lifestyle brand and experiential marketing.

A few months ago, while surveying local Seattle fashion community members, some responses stood out to me. When asked what might meaningfully help their work over the next year, one person said they wanted "a database or calendar that we can go to, to see what's going on in the area and who to get in touch with." Another wanted "news/events announced in a central place." Other themes came up as well. People described the local creative ecosystem as fragmented, citing varying priorities, limited coordination, a lack of dedicated leadership, and the time and money required to keep things moving. When asked what would actually be useful, a shared digital platform or directory was one of the recurring answers. Luckily, I already had one, but only for myself. That got me thinking about my private calendar. If I created this calendar to solve my own problem of keeping track of all the unique happenings in my city and places I'd be interested in traveling (or permanently moving to), would this resource be helpful for others looking for new spaces to occupy? Let's find out.

Thankfully, this thought came a few weeks before NYFW, which gave me the perfect opportunity to test the idea without turning it into a whole production. Not go all in with making it a business and charging visitors for access (which would defeat the entire purpose), charging event producers to list their events, or spending unnecessary money on paid ads. Just a curated calendar of events designed to offer attendees unique experiences, opportunities to expand their network, and a chance to take the next step in their career. So, I revamped Sequin Soirée from a back-burner marketing consulting brand into a public event calendar.

While I completely ruined my sleep schedule for about three weeks organizing the calendar, I'm proud of what I was able to do with it. Events span the U.S., with Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle as highlighted cities. Experiences cover brand activations, creative talks, launch parties, fashion shows, webinars, and more. I also wanted to organize something specific for NYFW because I noticed a healthy number of people looking for fashion-week-specific events to attend. So I organized the NYFW Spring/Summer 2027 Guide, a simple webpage that highlighted events related to fashion week, but were also either free or affordably priced to attend; no invitation needed. The goal was to challenge the idea that you can't make your mark on NYFW unless you're specifically invited to an official show. You can; you just need to know where to look.

So, did anyone actually use it?

I was surprised at the organic traffic the site received over its first 30 days. I soft-launched two weeks ahead of schedule on Monday, August 17th, which gave me time to share relevant links to the platform on Threads and let the site start getting indexed. From there, I let the site do its thing. I set up Google Analytics and Search Console accounts to understand where people were coming from, what they were looking at, and how they were finding the site. One of my biggest surprises was seeing ChatGPT show up as a traffic source. Google Search was still the larger of the two search referral sources, but I hadn't expected AI search to drive hundreds of visits to a brand-new site.

📊 Traffic Report:

Soft Launch to date: Monday, Aug. 17 - Friday, Sept. 25

• 3,759 unique visitors

• 4,140 visits

• 8,905 pageviews

• 550 Google Search referrals

• 302 ChatGPT referrals

• 2,298 outbound clicks

Then came New York Fashion Week. I created the NYFW Spring/Summer 2027 Guide to test whether a more focused, time-sensitive collection of events would attract people actively looking for things to do during fashion week. I didn't create a separate marketing campaign around it, but I was curious to see what happened when the guide was live during the actual NYFW window.

NYFW Guide: Monday, Sept. 7 - Friday, Sept. 18

• 1,845 unique visitors

• 1,988 visits

• 3,431 pageviews

• 285 Google Search referrals

• 176 ChatGPT referrals

• 1,039 outbound clicks

Again, I can't attribute all of the activity to the NYFW Guide itself, but the numbers were encouraging. During those twelve days, the NYFW period accounted for nearly half of Sequin Soirée's unique visitors and outbound clicks during its first 40 days, along with more than half of its Google Search and ChatGPT referrals.

I didn't build a marketing machine

I intentionally held off on a huge multichannel marketing strategy or even building an email list. Partly because I needed to preserve mental energy for my full-time job, and partly because I didn't want to recreate the exact problem I was trying to solve. I didn't want Sequin Soirée to become a platform people had to follow, subscribe to, download, or pay for just to find the free information they were looking for. I wanted someone to search for an event, find Sequin Soirée, get the information they needed, click through to the event, and go on with their day. I just wanted to make discovery a little easier, and the early traffic numbers suggest that it's working.

What's next?

Now that NYFW has passed, the plan is to continue curating the calendar until the end of the year and see how the organic traffic holds up. I expect it will dip as the weather cools down and event calendars wrap up for the holidays. Once I have more data, I'll decide which route to take. I have a running list of possibilities, from increasing brand awareness and building relationships with event producers to exploring brand partnerships and finding other ways to make the platform more useful without compromising what made me want to build this in the first place. Right now, I'm more interested in observing how people actually use it than forcing it into a predetermined business model.

So, how does Sequin Soirée fit into my career?

Right now, Sequin Soirée is a side project that lets me sharpen my brand and experiential marketing strategy, audience development, content management, analytics, and go-to-market skills while building something that shows the kind of work I want to be hired to do. It's also a reminder to stop waiting on someone else to solve a problem. I wanted a better way to keep track of the rooms, events, brands, and experiences I cared about. So I built one.

Maybe somewhere down the line, Sequin Soirée becomes a small business that generates some revenue, develops a few interesting partnerships, has a loyal audience, and only requires a few hours of my time each week. But I'm not trying to build the next Eventbrite. I'm much more interested in building something useful, seeing where it takes me, and letting the data determine what's worth pursuing.

Sometimes you gotta be what you don't see.