Our Story
My name is Adrian Kwan. I’m the Founder of The Pageant Project, which started back in April 2018.
As of the time of writing this (December 2021), I have conducted somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred interviews, the majority of those being pageant interviews, conducted either online or in person.
I first started interviewing back in 2016, after my experience coaching tennis at a private all-girls high school. It was there that I was first exposed to the unique challenges young women face - eating disorders, self-harm and bullying to name a few.
I wanted to provide these women with positive female role-models. NOT celebrities mind you (who often make dubious life choices), but ordinary women accomplishing extraordinary things.
As fate would have it, one of those early interviews was with an Australian pageant competitor. After attending a pageant fundraiser, I became aware of just how big the pageant industry was and the amazing things some of its members were achieving.
As my reputation began to spread, more and more of my interviews became pageant-themed. Not wanting to confuse people, I decided to start a brand dedicated exclusively to producing pageant content and, hey presto, The Pageant Project was born.
It’s perhaps hard to explain at this point just how big my pageant network has become.
Aside from the hundreds of interviews and podcast episodes I’ve created, I began pageant coaching this year (specialising in mindset), and have now coached contestants from every major system on the international stage (Universe, World, Earth, International and Grand). At this year’s Universe pageant in Israel I had no fewer than three clients competing (not bad for someone who had only been coaching for less than a year).
It quickly became apparent why so many pageant contestants had come to trust me as an interviewer, a coach, a friend or all three. Three words kept cropping up time and time again.
You see over the years I had learned that pageantry isn’t all fairytales and rainbows. At one point it seemed that for every positive story I’d been told, I was hearing two negative ones. Somewhere along the line, I decided I wanted to advocate for the following two things:
- An industry that places the welfare of its contestants above all else.
- An industry that encourages constructive debate and open discourse.
To that end, I would say that I’m not technically a pageant fan. I’m a fan of the incredible women I’ve met (and never would have met if it hadn’t been for pageantry). I cannot think of another industry that brings so many like-minded women together from so many different walks of life.
Turning to 2022, I’ve been wondering how to best continue my work in making the pageant industry a better, safer and fairer place for all.
Aside from releasing ‘Confessions of a Pageant Queen’ in December 2020 (both volumes of which went on to crack the Amazon Top Ten Best Sellers list), I founded The Pageant Sorority with the goal of helping you be more than ‘just’ a queen and instead helping you to make a real impact.
I believe that by bringing together amazing pageant competitors from around the world, something amazing is going to happen.
To be honest, I’m not quite sure what that something is yet.
But what I do know is that the people you meet in your pageant journey are the biggest gift you will take away, bigger than any crown or title. And I wanted to allow you to tap into the power of my network, because I think that network is the best and foremost antidote to some of the negativity you will doubtless encounter at some point in your pageant journey.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, and I’d love for you to send me an email on info@thepageantproject.com as to how we can best serve you. Because that’s what we’re here to do.
And in the meantime, let me know what legacy you want to leave behind, not only from your time in pageantry, but your life as well. I’ve been in this game long enough to know you probably have dreams of starting your own business, your own app, your own not for profit or just making an impact in general.
And I’d love to help you achieve just that.
To your success
Adrian Kwan.
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