We were so excited to dive into our first ever Bridal Show this past January. It was a lot of work to prepare for so we started early working on our design for the booth. The challenge was to show off as many of our rental items in a 5X10 space as possible. We taped off a space on the back porch to set up. We added items and took away items and changed the look here and there until we finally came up with what we thought was the best use for our space. Whew! It was done. We took pictures and carefully packed the items away for the haul to the Phoenix Convention Center. My daughter and son-in-law had our schedules of when we would set up, when we would take our shifts at the booth and who would be taking care of their 2 children.
Friday afternoon set up time arrived and we experienced the huge amount of vendors and their goods moving like ants from the street, the garage and the loading ramp! Did I say that this was our first Bridal Show? We quickly unloaded some of our things on the dock as one person drove and the other watched our stuff and Torey went in to see the space pushing the kids in the stroller. She came back to the dock where I was with a look of disbelief on her face……..I knew then that we definitely didn’t know what we were in for!
What we didn’t know was the most important thing about our space…….the FRONT of the booth was only 5 feet wide and it stretched 10 feet to the back! Our décor and backdrops were not in any way shape or form going to all fit into this space! We had already unloaded and had things on the dock and things in the isle of where our teeny tiny weirdly shaped space was! Oh my! So Torey quickly found the lady in charge of booths and asked her what were we to do? This was our first show and we were beyond novice convention vendors! I prayed while Torey pleaded. The Director said she loved the look of our décor and thank the Lord she marched us over to another booth that the vendors were a no show! The booth was 3 times our size and on a corner! Ok…….so it was in the very back of the hall…..but it was an answer to prayer. The director had a valet help us take all our things to the other booth and we then realized we didn’t have enough stuff to fill this booth!
We set up all that we had with us and we brought more the next morning to design the beautiful booth that we had! It was a whirlwind of two days! It was exciting to see the flow of people come back to us. Many of them we interested in talking to us and some just gave us a quick smile with no eye contact so they didn’t feel obligated to stop! We gave away a couple of prizes and enjoyed getting to know our neighbor vendors!
All in all we call it a success! We have already had a couple of bookings from the show and hope to do it again next year! Hopefully we learned a few things along the way!
So if you have a need for any rental décor contact us here on the Sweet Flower Home page and press the button on the top bar that says RENTAL. It will take you to our page that has all our info and some of our inventory. There is an inquiry page where you can contact us! We would love to make your event special!
Have a great day!
Carrie
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