What a long strange trip it's been...

To quote the late, great Jerry Garcia, these past two weeks have been one long and strange trip. From the moment I arrived in San Fran to the time I got back on the plane bound for Atlanta, it was all systems go. We thought the San Francisco International Gift Fair (That's SFIGF for those of you in the trade show biz) would be a way for us to dip our feet into the trade show pool. Little did we realize that once we committed to such a thing, we were on the high-high-dive of that pool and some sassy, smartalec kid was shoving us from behind making us fall head-first into the deep end. Let's just say the learning curve for gift showing was steep. However, with what little sleep we got, the excessive amounts of caffeine we consumed and the love and support from our friends and fam, we had an uber-successful gift show! We even met some really cool people along the way and learned that the love of paper is still alive and well. Those people made our hectic week totally worth it.

So, for all of you curious peeps out there, here is part uno of our booth set up. As you can tell, I had the camera most of the time, so Jen was our model for each step we captured. (Thanks, Jen for being a good sport).

Step 1: Buy shelving and spray paint it

This is Jen showing off her SoCal tagging skills from back in the day.

It case you can't read that, it says "Lil Dragon". Maybe tilt your head to the side?


We thought it would be super cool to paint the ends of the shelves orange. No one seemed to really notice, though, but we knew it was there.

Step 2: Go to the trade show center and paint the booth. There was literally no one there when we arrived at the Moscone center. They didn't even have our booth set up.

This is our "where is everybody" depiction.


Notice the guy setting up our lighting as we paint.

This is me jumping up the wall to try and paint the areas we couldn't reach.



Step 3: Install our beautifully painted shelving. Can you see the orange ends?


Step 4: Put up our name decal. This was the most nerve-wracking thing we had to do. Two sticky sides to the sign, plus psyching ourselves out b/c we if we screwed up we couldn't get a new sign= no bueno.

Step 5. Hang up framed signage. At 12:30 the night before we could not figure out the configuration we wanted for these signs. It was probably b/c our minds weren't firing on all cylinders. We finally figured it out by 1am and it paid off! We got many compliments from passer-byers on the signage. Win.

Step 6: Move in furniture. Then step back and admire the booth. In this picture, we were pretty much done w/ all the heavy lifting. We just needed to add our final touches and our cards.

Stay tuned for part dos of the booth set up. We'll be posting that later in the week, so you can see how awesome it looked. When it was all said and done, we pretty much loved our booth and were sad to take it down when the show ended.

Oh! and on a funnier, or shall we say ironic note, a few posts back we were stressing about the carpet and what we wanted to do for the flooring. Well, we scrapped the idea of putting floor tile down because my dad pointed out it would have taken over an hour to lay the tile. (thanks, dad) And the rug that we bought from Overstock was poo-poo, so this is what we ended up with:

It was the actual carpeting that came with the booth. Not too shabby SFIGF ;)