Goin’ Back to Houston… at LAST!

October 6, 2021 / Kat / Comments Off on Goin’ Back to Houston… at LAST!

So…

the last time we were in Houston, TX it was November of 2019. We had just completed the most amazing retail show of our career, I was looking down the barrel of a knee replacement surgery when I got home AND Covid wasn’t even remotely on anyone’s radar. Since then all of our retail shows have since been cancelled and we were very much hoping for an amazing Quilt Market AND Quilt Festival this Fall, so when it was suddenly decided a few weeks ago that Quilt Market would be cancelled for a 2nd straight year it was SO VERY depressing!

So now…. with our fingers crossed that Quilt Festival won’t get cancelled, we’re feverishly getting packed up to leave in a couple weeks but here’s the deal… planning-wise I feel like I’m totally flying by the “seat of my pants” since who knows what the attendance at Festival will be. Will it be anything close to normal?… or will it be huge since folks are so looking forward to the resumption of these shows? I guess we have no choice but to try hard and hope for the best! Either way, we NEED this show! So here’s what we’ve got in mind.

We’ll be located in Booth #122 this show. That would be the same aisle we were on for that ultra-successful show in 2019 but on the opposite side of the row, and the table setup you see above is exactly the same as we used in 2019… BUT, our product setup is going to look more like the setup we used at that little show we did in May in Pigeon Forge, TN (see below).
This section of the booth will likely stay pretty much the same (although I may bring different bag samples). In looking at this I think i could have squeezed another bag sample on top of the grid unit.
On the other hand though, I think I could make better use of this section of my display due to the fact that I’ve gotten so I bring very little hardware to these shows now (with the exception of Quilt Market), because I really don’t sell too much loose hardware anymore. The overwhelming amount of hardware we sell is tied up in the various pattern-specific notions kits we now sell and I always sell those from behind the counter. Oh I’ll bring some loose hardware along with us, but I can easily keep it behind the counter and retrieve/sell it for those who ask for it specifically (rather than display it in the red-circled area).
So this… combined with the fact there’s too much blank space in this display area (indicated by the blue circle above the zippers) should allow me to make this display a little more attractive and user friendly. 🙂
The one other important thing I intend on changing in Houston is to zip-tie my overhead lights to the cross bars. If you’ll check out my booth picture from MQF (at left above), you’ll see that our lights are kinda draped and riding low between our poles primarily because I only had one cross bar to place between the standup poles for my booth. I felt it would’ve looked dumb to have the lights zip-tied to only ONE side of the booth. But here’s the thing, attaching the lights to the cross poles as we were able to do in Houston in 2019 (see picture above at right), opens up the upper area of our booth so that sample bags can be placed on top of the gridboxes (instead of just the moose we had sitting there at the MQF) and more effectively hung from the poles themselves.

So now, with this plan in hand, all we need do now is plan out our “Sneek Peek” display (which we’ll show you in our next post) and oh yeah… we better start packing up all of those supplies and products, right? How could I forget THAT?

And now, it’s YOUR turn!

Do YOU have plans for attending the International Quilt Festival in Houston this year or any other quilt show in the coming months for that matter? and if you have comments, suggestions or questions you’d like to share about our setup in specific or the Houston show in general, please feel free to leave either or both in the space provided below.

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Kat