Street festival success inspires encore plans

Hamish Heard
A group of central-Geelong businesses has run a street festival to successfully target a mid-winter lull in trade.
Cats Restaurant and Bar owner Jimmy Javni said business proprietors along Little Malop Street had banded together with an informal committee to address a run of quiet Friday night trade along the trendy strip.
Following in the footsteps of St Kilda and Collingwood retailers, the group decided to put on street entertainment and stalls to draw customers away from the big shopping centres.
Mr Javni estimated up to 5000 people attended the street festival, lapping up the food, fashion, art and atmosphere that made the cosmopolitan street such a popular destination on Saturday nights.
The traders each chipped in money to cover the cost of staging the event, which Mr Javni said was between $5000 and $10,000.
“All the retailers and traders in the street basically said they had never had a night as successful as that,” he said.
“We definitely recouped our costs.”
The street festival was so successful that Mr Javni and the other traders were formalising their committee and had already begun organising an October festival.
“Regardless of whether you can recoup the cost of running an event, the real value comes from the increased awareness of what this little part of town has to offer,” Mr Javni said,
“Once people are exposed to that, they will want to come back.”
City of Greater Geelong manager for central Geelong and waterfront, Steve Bentley, praised the traders involved in the event.
He called the festival unprecedented.
“You felt as if you were in some cosmopolitan street in Sydney or Melbourne,” Mr Bentley said.