Caledon Studio Tour
Caledon’s Tourism and Culture team launched the inaugural Studio Tour in 2024 as part of the Ontario Culture Days festival. Our submission is for the EDAC Single Advertisement award for our illustrated Caledon Studio Tour advertisement, published in In the Hills magazine. The project objective of the Caledon Studio Tour was to provide a unique and authentic tourism experience for visitors to Caledon, showcasing the region’s local arts and culture community by encouraging economic impact across the many villages and hamlets in the Town. The Studio Tour showcased 26 artists at over 18 stops across the Town of Caledon through a self-guided weekend-long tour. This event encouraged visitors to get up close and personal with the artist process, ask questions and purchase one-of-a-kind pieces of art directly from the artist. The challenges associated with the project included Caledon’s broad geographic area (spanning the size of Brampton and Mississauga combined) and the rural nature of many of our artist studios.
For the 2025 Studio Tour, we have opted to forgo the artist opening ceremony that kicked off the 2024 Studio Tour weekend in an attempt to encourage visitors to start the tour from any studio location versus specifically in one community.
Our target audience for this print advertisement was higher income-earning adults, 45 years and older, traveling from a minimum distance of 40 kilometers from Caledon. To reach our specific target audience, we chose to make a unique single advertisement by commissioning a local artist and illustrator to bring a map of the participants on the Studio Tour to life. Working with local Caledon (Alton) artist Kayla Jackson, we commissioned the design of a unique illustrated rendering of a map of Caledon highlighting unique characteristics of our community of communities. The end result was a beautiful map highlighting the artist mediums explored along the Studio Tour, as well as iconic Caledon landmarks and important event information.
In The Hills is an independently published and distributed magazine delivered to more than 40,000 homes and farms throughout Caledon, Erin, Dufferin County, Orangeville and Creemore: approximately double the circulation of any other local publication. A coveted publication released quarterly, In the Hills is available to visitors at local inns, restaurants, specialty retail stores and other tourist locations. This project worked sustainably by employing a local artist and supporting a local publication to help promote the Town’s unique tourism offering. Through a post-event survey, we learned that 55% of Studio Tour attendees left an economic impact in the community, either purchasing art directly from local artists or by supporting local businesses while exploring the Studio Tour. Upon surveying the artists, 93% of Studio Tour artists had a positive experience as project participants and over 65% of artists made sales of their works. As a result of the 2024 Caledon Studio Tour efforts, the Town of Caledon’s Culture Days programming ranked in the National Top 10 and is now recognized as an official Ontario Culture Days hub municipality for the 2025 season. We look forward to offering the Studio Tour again in 2025 and working with Kayla on an updated advertisement to be published in a number of print publications reaching audiences across the GTA.
