Shipping your products and booth setup to a trade show
Okay, here I am to talk about the dang trade show. I think I’ll start from the beginning so today is going to be about shipping and getting your product to the show. I live close enough to Vegas to drive. So, true to my nature, I work right up to the last minute. The show had a full 24-hour move-in, so I knew that whenever I got there in the evening, I’d have time to move in.
I went by myself. My husband was going to go, but we couldn’t take my daughter out of her kindergarten class the very first week of school. This is where we’re at, so off I went. The drive was fine. The move-in was a different nightmare all together.
Our booth was, in my opinion, a million miles away from the main entrance – the only entrance you’re allowed to hand move-in through. I about died when I walked in and saw how far I was going to have to “carry” everything. We were actually on row 15. Which wasn’t anywhere near as far back as we could have been – the size of the show is my next post.
I was moving stuff to our booth until 2:00 in the morning. The only thing that saved me was this old-school baby pram (buggy) we had purchased as a means of displaying our blankets. That thing became my dolly. But it took a lot of trips. And I still had to hand-carry the carpet – which I saved to last and I had to chant “that-the-that which don’t kill me, can only make me stronger” to myself the whole way to keep from crumbling to the floor in a ball of tears.
I got the booth setup by 3:30 in the morning. Well, I saved some of it for the morning, taking the risk and assuming that the first hour would be slow. Buyers wouldn’t even make it to row 15 in an hour. I also knew that there was no way in hell I was moving out the same way I moved in.
Turned out that most of the vendors around me also had various shipping issues to deal with. Some had shipped via UPS instead of the exhibition’s shipping services. This meant that they also had to deal with the hand-carry issue, because UPS was offsite shipping.
I signed up for the cartload program to get me out of there. They loaded my stuff on one cart and got it out to my car in about 5 minutes. Of course, that was after quite a wait because the line for the cartload program was huge (which goes back to the size of the show also).
So, many of you haven’t done your first trade show to know what a nightmare the logistics are. After the few I’ve done, I fully believe it is worth it to use the exhibition’s shipping services and just bite the bullet. Some savvy people only had to box their stuff and saran-wrap it. They dropped off the shipping labels early on the last day, vendors boxed up their stuff, stuck those labels on and walked away.
Far less painful and time consuming than getting your product out of the hall yourself. I paid $45 for them to load my stuff and tote it out – I can’t tell you how cheap that sounded after moving myself in.
Add comment September 20th, 2007