What I Learned at CanCon 2019
Last weekend, we made the 7 hour drive from Melbourne to Canberra to exhibit at CanCon 2019. Although I’ve worked at exhibitor booths before, and we even had a small section of a booth for LudoCherry at PAX Aus last year, this was the first time we’ve had our very own space at a convention!
Ready to start Day 1 of CanCon!
Everything went smoothly (a huge thanks to Mark for helping me keep it together while we prepared and set up), and we had a fantastic time talking to everyone who stopped by to look at the clothes!
As a first time exhibitor, it was also an interesting experience to discover things that we weren’t necessarily prepared for and to see how we could make our booth better for the next event we attend.
If you’ve run your own booth before none of this will be a surprise, but hopefully this advice is helpful to anyone looking to exhibit at a con for the first time (or at least for giving you a sneak peek at the effort that goes into attending events like this)! So, here are the most important things I learned from exhibiting at CanCon.
Prepare everything early
Make a list of everything you’ll need for the event 1-2 months ahead of time, and start sourcing everything. There will be things on your list that you know take time to make (eg printing business cards / flyers), but there will also be items that you think should be easy to find but just aren’t available anywhere. Maybe this is only an issue for us Australians without the “real” Amazon experience of guaranteed next day delivery on most things, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
Running a booth is far more exhausting than you expect
You might think you know what it will be like if you’ve attended large conventions before, and you might be used to playing board games non-stop for 4 days straight with just a few hours sleep each night, so you think “It’s fine, I got this! I can exhibit and still play games all night”. That’s what I thought too.
It sounds obvious, but running a booth is work. You’ll be standing all day, talking all day, promoting all day, and you won’t get much / any time for a break unless you’re lucky enough to have someone helping you out.
Make sure you drink LOTS of water, pack portable snacks like muesli bars so you can sneak in a quick bite to eat if you need it, keep a packet of Strepsils handy, and get enough sleep. Caffeine can get you through a con as an attendee, but it’s not enough if you’re exhibiting all day for 3-4 days straight.
Our mannequin Kevin being too cool for me…
Most people don’t want to talk to you, and that’s okay
No matter how awesome your product is, a lot of people just won’t want to approach the booth. The first important thing is to not take it personally. The second is to make sure you have signs! Making sure you have information about your product visible to attendees just walking past your booth will help attract more people to talk to you, and will let others look you up later if they really don’t want to engage in a conversation.
I’d definitely recommend that you have a banner with at least your brand name, logo, website, and social media accounts so they can follow you online. Ideally, you also want to have signs with your product’s key selling points so that people can read about them without approaching the booth. Finally, having flyers available is a great way to make sure people can quickly grab some more information without being forced to talk to you.
For CanCon, I wish we’d had a sign above Suzie (one of our mannequins) telling attendees that the skirts have pockets as that’s definitely a major selling point for everyone who hears it! Another commonly asked question was the size range that the garments will be available in, so we’ll make sure to have that on a sign at our next event.
Collect newsletter signups digitally if possible
Most people have terrible handwriting (myself included), and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you can use a program to collect newsletter signups digitally at the convention.
If you have internet access, you can use Google Forms for free but this doesn’t work offline.
We used Sign Up Anywhere for both CanCon and PAX Aus, and it’s definitely worth it if you can afford the expense (you can just sign up for a month and downgrade after the event). The forms are customisable with your branding, they’re clean and elegant, and they’re incredibly easy to build.
Collecting emails digitally will save you time importing them afterwards, and will prevent you from missing out on a contact just because you can’t interpret whether that squiggle is a “7” or a “9”.
A packed hall at Can Con 2019!
Despite being exhausted, we did get some time to play some games at CanCon including Railroad Ink (a route building roll-and-write) and Wingspan (the gorgeous new Stonemaier game).
Tell us what you’re playing in the comments, or what you’re hoping to play next, and we’ll be back next week with another blog update!