Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,
This weekend was the Alternative Press Expo in San Jose! The event is essentially an independent Comic-Con where independent artists come out with their comic books, illustrations, characters, and various other art implementations to hopefully hit into that market at an affordable rate for a booth & find new fanatics. Izzy & I went to APE last year when it was in San Francisco’s Fort Mason as guests… and it was pretty impressive. A plethora of great artists & comic book creators to check out and purchase their wares. You can read more about it HERE!
This year, the event has become truly independent and the founder of Slave Labor Graphics (“Invader Zim”, etc) has taken over the event from its Comic Con backing… and moved the event to San Jose, back where it originally began a few years ago in the San Jose Convention Center’s South Hall. Now… it was mentioned before that the process in getting a booth at the convention was… frustrating to say the least. Izzy& I went with three other of her friends/artists to go in on a booth & minimize the (in hindsight ridiculous) costs of the booth… but Izzy & I definitely kinda took the lead in getting everything handled with the planner… but to no avail. We didn’t get a whole lot of information ahead of time, and when we did it wasn’t in a timely manner. I understand… skeleton crews with no events and all that… I’ve been a part of a few… so please don’t get it twisted. However, when it resulted in us signing up MONTHS in advance… and then being placed in the worst-corner possible… purely because of incompetence… that’s when it becomes an issue. It felt a little fishy… but hey, we’re awesome & we’ll soldier on. 99% of the time, the experience is what you make of it!
So we set out early Saturday morning to get out there around 8 AM and get setup before the event starting at 11 AM. As luck would have it, there was a setup issue the day before so they had to move some things around… and as luck would have it, we were still in kind of an off-corner… but it ended up being between the Altspace Virtual Reality booth and the coffee / food court area… and directly across from where the speaker seminars were. GROOVY BONUS!!! Anyway, here are some pictures of us setting up…
After a few hours of having expo guests come check out our INCREDIBLY CUTE stuff… Izzy had to test out her new Umbreon outfit to help promote our booth and also just wander around and meet her fellow colleagues…
Then it was time for lunch…
One of the major benefits of having five people at our booth, is that we could keep two people there while the others checked out the event if needed, but as it really wasn’t my scene (and I’m the financial guy) then I was the last one to wander around but there was a lot of great booths… but they didn’t want us taking a bunch of pictures obviously, so here is what I have…
Oh… and then we found a booth on the far end that had our names on it… which is odd because they specifically directed us to our more convenient booth… AWESOME!!! There were also some great speakers about setting up Kickstarter projects, getting into the industry, and such…
After a long day, we chilled at the Ramada Inn nearby… and then did it again on Sunday for another six hours… which meant another run around from Umbreon… this time, with a special deal on prints!!!
Unfortunately it seems like most of the exhibitors that we talked with didn’t seem to do too well… for a variety of reasons. Attendance was okay, but not great… there was a lot of different things offered… with a lot of different price points, some not at all for the casual expo attendee… but yeah, based on what we were told… it seemed like most people lost a lot of money getting a booth. So with that… we felt FANTASTIC to break even at our booth! WE DID GRRRRREAT!!! Breaking even wasn’t bad for a first event of this scope… so congratulations to all the ladies! We very well may do this again next year… definitely if the booths are less expensive which it almost seems like they would have to be for most exhibitors to return. Overall, a fantastic weekend!!!
What does this mean for us? We’re going to probably be in a LOT more fairs and expos like this in the next year now that Izzy & her friends have free time (graduated) and I really like the process and think that we have GREAT stuff to offer to a variety of guests. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted on where you can meet up with us. Have a great day everybody!!!
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