Prepping-- Con-style

I type this to you with fingers that have me cartoonishly going ouch oooch eech with every tap.

That's right we're in the middle of not just con-prep but Kickstarter fulfillment. Our tiny little apartment is looking a teeeeeny bit crowded these days.

We talk a lot about having an art job but not really about all the non-art stuff that it entails... I mean... SOME of us are talking about that stuff if you really know where to look for it.

So here's a bit of what we do the weeks/months before a con.

Generally we prep for an entire Con Season during the winter and add small things along the way as things progress, this year is panning out really different for us but I won't get into that.

Generally a month (two is best) before the show we're taking inventory, counting through everything we've got, double checking stock that's real low and making sure we're not on the cusp of running out unless we mean for it to. Anything low-enough we put the orders in/budget for what we can afford to keep on the roster, what can wait etc.

(We shed a tear for Delicious as we will not have any of her to sell this weekend after fulfilling the Kickstarter this week...sigh).

We're not doing the GREATEST job of this for Montreal Comiccon coming up because a lot of things kind of got in our way. We're out of Delicious pins and Augustine V1s are supposed to come in the Thursday RIIIIGHT before the weekend which is not ideal but you gotta just roll with the punches sometimes!

Once everything is ordered we take stock of display, we workshop how the display can work better/if we're comfortable with what we have.... (this usually leads to a 'spur of the moment' purchase that Might Help but doesn't always so its not recommended unless you do this according to some sort of Table Game Plan).

Weeks leading up to the event are A Lot, especially in the final week. We prepare a lot of our stuff last-minute since it takes up a lot of room otherwise.

First off-- Pin Prep.

Pin prep in this case meant setting up all the Saturn pins with rubber backings we ordered eons ago to make them feel more 'space'-y. Our shop orders always come with extra military clasps in case folks prefer to affix them to clothing & backpacks since those hold better. But sometimes you have a little aesthetic beast inside you that wants to just make things cute.

Pin prep USUALLY means setting them on backboards and wrapping them in plastic sleeves-- we've recently changed our method however to take advantage of a bit more eco-friendly (and honestly cheaper and easier on the fingers for us) by packaging them into little cotton bags! We've got a new set-up this year that's made digging them out for people a lot easier during the actual show! This is a Winter-ism (hi).

Our set-up behind the scenes looks a little something like this:

Pin goes in a tiny bag and multiple pins in their tiny bags go in a bigger bag with the label on it so we don't have to individually label each one. Then we sort THOSE by sets in bigger drawstring bags we're re-using from amazon gifts people gave us or miscellaneous purchases we've made elsewhere. *

This method has um... made us extremely aware of how many pins we actually have and we're now working on a means of pairing these down so that we don't have such expansive sets but we're still thinking that over and how that looks like for us. We've taken to alternating which sets we take to smaller cons we only have one table for.... but Montreal Comiccon is a con we reserve 2 tables for generally so we're going to have to double-down and work on restocking our con-inventory this week.

* Small side note.... if any of you know where to donate small polybags we're all ears. I know recycling is possible but our recycling system in Canada is not the BEST so if we can give these guys a second life we're definitely all ears... we just have a huge bag full of them now we're not sure what to do with haha!

Speaking of 'pairing down' though we're also coming back with mystery bags this year... Except this time they look like mystery boxes! Pillow boxes! With some very on-brand thread to seal them!

Each one has a single pin, a few of the designs we originally purchased in bigger quantities than actually sell at a con (sometimes the pin that does fantastic on the Kickstarter does NOT actually do the best at a convention or in online sales.... go figure). We're selling these at half the selling price of the pins displayed. (My fingers hurt a lot from tying all those knots in particular eech ouch). But there is something extremely satisfying about 'crafting' and putting things together. Its a bit more effort put into them than it's worth in the sale but it satisfies me a lot, personally so I love to do it anyway.

Last big push before a con is planning.... right now we have books coming in the mail, as I'm writing this the second part of our display finally came in. The con itself allows for set-up on Thursday but our extra set of hands is only available on Saturday to help haul the brunt of it so we're balancing a lot this week!

This isn't quite ALL the stuff we'd like to have for Friday but its still a pretty impressive pile, we're still missing like double the amount of books, the pins and the trinkets to haul in come opening time (not including .... all our pins). We also have a lot of display to carry so we have to be reasonable here. Our best case scenario is we get the books we're waiting for on Thursday morning/early afternoon so that we can haul our set-up over there, have that set up and ready to go for us on Friday when we haul our books.

Luckily this IS a local con and Fridays are not our BIGGEST sales day so we can afford to bring less to start with and have help with our extra set of hands on Saturday with restock!

And that's that! Then it's con-time baby. We spend the evening before the show quickly making sure everything is all charged up, print up an inventory sheet and then we're all chill-vibes saying hi-hello to everyone who stops by! If all goes well everything is smooth sailing~

I don't know what compelled me to write all of this but it felt nice to kind of talk about it a little bit more~!

Happy Saturday everyone (yeah look at me working on a Saturday, I'm setting a good example. I promise after this its sweet and peasy take it easy).

Winter

PS -- if you like me posting little snippets of process-like stuff let me know and I can make more of an effort to talk a bit of shop every so often!

PPS -- If you want to know Numbers and How Much we bring to each con we also have a bunch of blog-posts dedicated to our conventions on our Windy & Wallflower website! Which you can also RSS to ;v;/

PPPS -- Yes the post says Saturday but i posted this just now on Monday because it took me a hot second to take and edit the photos woopsie!!