The Big Show

Sorry for the brief hiatus yesterday, everyone. It was my husband Jon's birthday and I was scrambling to make sure everything was taken care of. If it makes you feel any better, I did wrap all of his presents in paper grocery bags because I ran out of wrapping paper and, surprise, no gift wrap outlets were open at 11:30 at night. So the neglect wasn't only confined to this blog (it was a great birthday, though-- grocery bags and all).

Today we thought we'd tell you a little bit more about this whole Stationery Show thing we keep going on about. If you had asked me before all this what I thought a "Stationery Show" would consist of, I would have probably imagined some elaborate origami reenactment of the current Britney Spears tour. So, to save you from envisioning a paper Britney debasing herself in a thinly veiled cage dance, we'll give you a few more details.

The National Stationery Show is (and I quote from their website) "the premiere market for social stationery and related products in the United States." Basically, it's the place where, from May 17-20, anyone who's anyone in stationery gathers at the Javits Center in New York City in a friendly spirit of competition and consumerism (if anyone senses ripe ground for the next Christopher Guest movie, you're not alone). But it really is a pretty amazing event. About 14,000 buyers and 1,000 exhibitors attend and you get to see all of the best products out there.

And we are officially the first-year newbies. Bring on the sparkle pen hazing.

Really, though, it's pretty intense to attend this thing for the first time. We had heard that the major hurdle that tripped up most first-timers was their booth. When you buy a booth, you literally get a card table and four white curtain walls and it's up to you to make it look amazing. Because it's in New York, you would have to ship anything in the way of furniture that you would want in your booth. We started to panic until another one of our heroes stepped in to save the day: Perry Blake (aka Kristin's dad).




For those of you who don't know Perry, he is an INCREDIBLY talented production designer for films, among his other hobbies of being the nicest guy in the world and saving our butts. He is currently working on a movie in Boston and, when he heard we were really doing this crazy venture, offered to help us design and implement our booth. A sketch of his genius is below.






Now, this isn't just some slip of paper with shiny objects and empty promises. Perry is actually coming down from Boston the weekend of the show, bringing all of the lights, furniture, etc. that we need and helping us get it all in place-- meaning that we don't have to have our brains explode under the strain of trying to ship everything. And if that wasn't enough, he has come up with some of the most baller ideas to ever hit a stationery booth. You'll have to wait to see the pictures to see the extent of it all, but there are some fun things coming (speaking of which, we will be blogging and posting pictures throughout the show so that you guys get a bird's eye view of how it all goes down). Needless to say, we owe Perry big-time. Even more than that one time when he took us in off the street and saved us from starvation in Berlin when we couldn't handle the heat of true bohemian European backpacking.

In other Stationery Show news, we just found out that our frames and imprintables got accepted to compete in the Best New Products competition at the Show. This is really cool because the judges for this competition are a collection of media people and VIP buyers-- who now will for sure get to see some of our products. We're pretty excited about it. And we just got a sample of our cards back from the printers today. I sense another Sneak Peek coming on.