Review by just prom on 26th October, 2009

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Well what can we say? We had very high hopes for this prom event… the first event in the UK which promised to be totally focussed on prom, with a whole plethora of prom events promised over the two days… “over 70 exhibitors” with magician, catwalk show and everything for prom you could possibly want. Needless to say we were thrilled at the prospect of having so much exposure and were quite happy to shell out the required several hundreds of pounds (not to mention getting up at 5:30am) to travel from home in Berkshire to go all the way to Warwickshire to exhibit! The truth of this event, unfortunately is far from the rosy picture the organisers led us to believe… Looking at the directions sheet, something was niggling at me… you know when you get that feeling that something ‘isn’t quite right?’ Well we headed off the M40 and I immediately thought… we aren’t going towards Leamington Spa (the location we thought the advertised address of “The Warwickshire Exhibition Centre in Leamington Spa” should be pointing us towards…). Instead we end up in the middle of nowhere, heading towards a converted farm… far away from any kind of population centre which we would (quite rightly) think would be needed to allow the projected 10 – 16 year old girls we should be targetting for our dresses to attend. OK… well all is not lost we thought. It’s Sunday, before a school holiday. Surely mummy and daddy can bring their offspring for a bit of an excursion into the countryside to find their perfect prom dress. No problemo! By 11am we were starting to re-evaluate our thoughts somewhat. Most prom or wedding fairs usually tend to get at least “some” people turning up when the doors open. These ‘early birds’ tend to have a good look round the exhibition and talk to the exhibitors. We like these people as they stop us from feeling bored and kinda make us feel that getting up on a Sunday morning to go and stand around for 8 hours maybe was not a complete waste of time. But oh no… it turns out that the four people we did actually get to speak to before 2pm (when we had enough and were actually thinking up games to keep ourselves amused) were probably friends / relatives of the models who had turned up for the badly managed and ridiculously poor quality catwalk show. Let me tell you about that… OK. Let me start by saying that getting up on a catwalk and strutting your stuff is NOT EASY. At Just Prom we’ve done it ourselves and we know how hard it is… Just being able to get the dresses on (and getting them to stay on!) is hard enough, but when you throw in a lack of choreography, ridiculously stupid music selection and a “DJ” (I use the term VERY loosely!) who did not seem to be able to use the simplest of mixing desks then it’s a recipe for disaster. The audience for this particular event (which as I’ve said consisted mainly of friends / relatives of the models on the catwalk) had to endure not only a completely ridiculous choice of music, but said music was played (very obviously) through one channel of a stereo system, so that both the songs (and completely innane) commentary sounded like it was being played from within a tin-walled bathroom… the kind you would get in someones back yard in the 1800’s maybe! This would not have been so bad if half of the tracks were either skipping or so badly mixed that you weren’t sure if you were listening to Beyonce or Puff Didddly. The girls on the catwalk tried their best… they really did… but now I know why they were all running down the catwalk and getting off the stage as quickly as possible! Next in this troupe of complete disasters was a “magician” (for want of a better word) who proceeded to show the audience how he was swallowing “stainless steel needles”. Talk about inappropriate! So… your 8 year old daughter wants to know how to impress her friends? Simple! Swallow some sewing needles! The day got progressively worse, with attendees having to cuddle together to get warmth (the “Warwick Exhibition Centre” is afterall a glorified cowshed!) until around 2pm when someone decided they were going to actualy turn on the heaters. We have a lovely girl in the stand next to us (sorry didn’t get your name… too busy shivering!) who was going blue in her prom dress and who finally gave in and put her jeans and jumper back on. The day at the prom nites Expo 2009 finished for us at around 3pm when we had finally lost the will to live and packed the stand up. At this point many of the exhibitors were looking for blood and threatening violence on the organisers… I don’t think (somehow) that they are going to get out of this one very well. As I said at the beginning… it’s such a pity. This COULD have been the first (and best) prom exhibition in the UK. As it was it was blatantly obvious that the organisers hadn’t done nearly enough advertising , hadn’t used the right advertising mediums (it’s all about the Internet for the kind of people we are targetting for prom… they should have known this!) and we definitely won’t be back next year.

Date visited: Sunday 25th october