DIGITAL PR CASE STUDY

      Culture Kings: a key category taken to #1

      Culture Kings is one of Australia's biggest streetwear and fashion retailers. Going into the 2025/26 festival season, they'd named three product categories as the ones to grow, graphic tees, jorts and headwear, and wanted the organic visibility to match. The trouble is, on their own those categories don't make headlines. 
       
      So we didn't pitch the products. We built a festival-wear story big enough to carry them, then used digital PR to earn the coverage, links, and rankings a product pitch never could, turning earned media into category pages that rank and convert. Here's how it came together.
      Group 1829
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      40
      Pieces of national coverage
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      339%
      Organic traffic growth (target collection)
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      #1
      Ranking for target keyword "black jorts"
      culture kings store
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      Culture Kings is one of Australia's largest streetwear retailers, built on a stable of in-house brands and three core customer personas. Its collections run from everyday staples through to loud, statement pieces rooted in nostalgia and pop culture, with festival season a genuine style moment for its audience.

      The Need

      The brief was clear: grow organic visibility for three commercial priorities, graphic tees, jorts and headwear, without chasing vanity press.
      Two things made that hard:
      • Three categories that aren't newsworthy. Individually, tees, jorts and headwear give a journalist nothing to write about. We needed a reason for the media to care.
      • A digital PR only remit. Every link we earned had to translate into structured authority for the right category pages, not scattered mentions on the homepage.
      • A crowded seasonal moment. Festival season pulls plenty of brands fighting for the same attention, so the story had to earn its place, not buy it.

      The Plan

      The only way to make three ordinary categories matter was to anchor them in a story worth covering. So we built the campaign around one umbrella the whole category could live inside: festival wear, timed to the Australian festival season.
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      A festival-wear umbrella
      One seasonal story big enough to surface all three priority categories naturally, without pitching the products directly.
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      Festival Ticket Prices
      A hard-news, national angle built on external pricing data, giving journalists a genuine reason to link.
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      Festival Fashion Trends
      A trend-led angle built on Culture Kings' own first-party styling data, giving the brand real authority to speak on festival style and reach further internationally.
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      A search-optimised landing page.
      The hero story hosted on-site as a linkable asset journalists could cite, rather than a homepage mention.
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      Internal linking into the collections.
      Authority funnelled straight into the tees, jorts and headwear category pages the client wanted to move.
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      One coordinated team
      Worked directly with Culture Kings' in-house SEO and PR teams so the coverage compounded with their own activity instead of competing with it.

      The Execution

      With the angle set, the build began, and every asset had to earn a link.
      finance
      Built the data
      Analysed 20+ years of ticket pricing across 11 major Australian festivals, cross-checked against ABS CPI inflation data. A credible, methodology-backed hook journalists could trust and cite.
      link
      Made it linkable
      Hosted the story as an on-site, search-optimised landing page, so coverage pointed at an asset built to rank and convert, not the homepage.
      language
      Pitched wide
      National mastheads, plus regional (WA) and niche music and festival outlets, widened the domestic footprint. The trend-led angle travelled internationally into the UK and US.
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      Worked as one system
      Coordinated on-site optimisation and internal linking with Culture Kings' in-house team, so earned coverage turned into structured link equity.
      culture kings press page
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      The hero asset was a search-optimised landing page, not a press release. That single decision meant every placement pointed at a page built to rank, with 30 of 32 backlinks landing directly on the asset itself.

      The Challenges Overcome

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      Categories that don't make headlines
      Grouped under a genuinely newsworthy festival-wear story, the collections surfaced naturally, with no product pitch needed.
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      A Christmas news lull
      With journalists focused on seasonal news, we held the main push for Boxing Day onwards, running outreach past the contracted window to hit the peak of festival season.
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      Reaching beyond the nationals

      We broke the dataset into region and market-specific cuts, making regional Australian and international UK and US versions relevant and pitchable, rather than sending one generic story everywhere.

      The Results

      The campaign didn't just earn coverage; it moved the exact categories the brief named. "Black jorts" took the top spot, "snapback cap" went from unranked to #1, and "graphic t-shirts" jumped from nowhere into the top four.
       
      Coverage landed in national mastheads including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and a full feature in The West Australian naming Culture Kings in the headline, with sentiment entirely positive to neutral.
       
      Category Keyword Before After
      Jorts "black jorts" 2 #1
      Jorts "jorts" (27,100 searches/mo) Unranked #4
      Headwear "snapback cap" Unranked #1
      Graphic tees "graphic t shirts" Unranked #3

       

      rewarded_ads
      1#
      Ranking for "black jorts"
      Up from position 2 on a 3,600 searches per month term, the campaign's flagship win.
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      40
      Pieces of coverage
      Earned across national, regional and international media, peaking at DR 94 (Yahoo!).
      rewarded_ads
      32
      Clean backlinks
      With 30 pointing directly at the campaign landing page, giving the asset itself real authority to pass into the collections.
      rewarded_ads
      339%
      Organic traffic growth
      To the Men's Bottoms collection, the exact page the client wanted to move.
      rewarded_ads
      391M+
      Estimated audience reach
      Independently tracked by SimilarWeb across the 40 placements since October 2025.
      rewarded_ads
      106%
      Branded traffic growth
      To the graphic tees collection, evidence the coverage lifted brand awareness across the priority categories.

      The Conclusion

      For Culture Kings, digital PR wasn't a coverage exercise. It was a revenue one. By anchoring three everyday fashion categories in a story worth covering, and building it as a search asset rather than a press release, we turned earned media into #1 rankings and measurable traffic on the collections that sell.
       
      For a retailer, that is the whole point of digital PR: earned media that shows up as category rankings and collection traffic, not just coverage. Digital PR, traditional PR, and technical SEO working as one system, not three.
       
      "StudioHawk took three of our core product categories and turned them into a story that landed us in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The West Australian, coverage we simply wouldn't have secured through branded pitching alone. What stood out was how seamlessly they worked alongside our internal PR and SEO teams. A #1 ranking for one of our priority categories and real, measurable traffic growth."
      Michael Brown
      Global Digital Marketing Manager, Culture Kings

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