Knate makes stuff
Unlock the Con
It's Con Day! It has been a wild week. Managed to put in a lot of shop hours and I'm super happy with the results. Nothing's ever smooth first go though, and there's a lot of things I would have liked to do but ran out of time.
I somehow managed to order the wrong LED controllers, and by the time I realized it even Amazon couldn't deliver in time. The controllers I got still work but they're super lame. Can't even change it to a solid color scheme. So I'll demo
both and provide a link to the amazon controller that is correct. Anyway come check me out today. Figured out how to embed Instagram reels too, check those out to see some of my process.
Alright, so I just finished my first booth day. I was invited to setup an artist booth at Unlock the Con and wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to setup shop in a mall. It was both a huge success and a failure depending on your perspective. After tallying the sales for the day I came out negative $8.50 for the lunch I bought while there. About 2 gallons of gas so more like -$16.50. Actually I gave out 10 free small prints to get instagram followers… so with filament costs and electricity I probably made about -$50 today. Might have to quit my day job at this rate =]. But this was my first booth with no prep and damn did I learn a lot from the experience. The location is interesting. It’s near a mall entrance so you get lot’s of traffic from people entering and exiting. My booth was in the window display of that entrance, and the store itself (Unlock the Con) had two entrances. The booths are setup near the back closer to the entrance/exit so the traffic I saw was usually already set to leave or get to their store of choice. Another variable I’m dealing with is nobody who went to the mall that day was planning to buy anything from me. Art is especially hard to sell to someone that likely went to the mall that day to buy a few things from specific stores. That’s fine, I didn't expect to sell much, my intention was to promote my brand. So as the day progressed I realized that the traffic I needed to focus my display on was behind me the whole time. I setup some of my display to be directed at that traffic outside the window but after the day and some contemplation I needed to focus 100% on that window traffic. If I go back (which I plan to at least a few more times, met a few great people), then I’m going to really focus on driving that exit/entrance traffic towards the booth. Or at least have a massive QR code to scan to visit my instagram and website. All in all I learned a ton, the Milwaukee packout system is amazing for this kinda gig (Sponsor me Milwaukee!). Brought everything in with one go, could easily hide the containers under the table, and also have the ability to lock up my drawers while I head out for lunch or a smoke break. Gotta work a bit on my business pitch but I feel it coming together. All in all a good learning experience. A win in my book. Thanks for takin the time to read my thoughts. I’m hoping my insights can help someone interested in pursuing a similar path to myself. Eventually I’ll try to make some real good walk through videos on how to create your own free static website, pay nothing for hosting and pay nothing for email form handling. Keep liking anything I post please and share whatever you can. Feel free to reach out with any commissions or comments. Have a good one, Knate