I wanted to follow up on my conversation from yesterday, and put it writing in case I get distracted today. Start thinking about all the things you’d like to improve for next year’s booth. Not just merchandising-wise, but on the setup process as well. You got too late a start on the shelves and that needs to be avoided. We need to understand time-wise how long it takes to setup the Guidecraft shelves, Tilo section, Zigler booth, etc. and I want you to be in charge of shows. If you’re not stepping in and dictating timelines and who is doing what task. There was no one really in charge at the show and that can’t happen again. We need to be much more concerned with timeline, and tasks – who is doing what, for a show with this much complexity.
Today, take some time to walk around and take photos of other booths that you like, so we can evaluate what we’re going to do next year for this show, and how we can improve our display concepts. My overall feeling is that we need to be more hands-on with some of our toys. People want to really touch product at shows and our displays aren’t optimal for that. We need to open up Zigler, so I’ll look for a bigger booth next year, and we need a better presentation for University. Don’t ever bring a printout to a show again and glue it to a wall. That display is horrible. I didn’t understand what the thought process was there. Syma could have easily printed that and mounted it, and the design wasn’t even right. The University logo was left off. That level of poor management can’t be part of our process.
Next year, we’ll cover the show setup in more detail the day before, and not have sales people doing setup. Salespeople need to show up when the booth is all ready. They actually get in they way. Alex was helpful, so was Vivian. But they aren’t salespeople. We should consider sending all the furniture assembled as well. Furniture shouldn’t be assembled at the show – you can’t react quick enough if something is wrong. We shouldn’t be building models at shows either. All the IO Blocks and complicated models need to come assembled.
This show is going to be our most important show each year. It’s the only one where we promote our full portfolio of brands, so it has to be amazing, and be an evolutionary concept. It can’t be a static presentation. Every year we are going to go into greater depth on this, and evolve our story.
So start working up a visual concept to encapsulate all of these notes. I’d do it in Illustrator, with a section in the document with notes for each part of the booth, as well as a section for process, setup, samples, etc.
It just occurred to me that Jord may be upset that she wasn’t invited. I hope that’s not the case, but we didn’t need her at the show. This is your area of expertise.