The Road to the Expo- Stalled

How do you spend 3 days in a 3m x 2m box?

Our road to the Expo continues! To recap, we're taking a big step here at BGS this year- our first venture to the UK Games Expo 2024! We'll be bringing our unique range of gaming accessories to the show if you're a fan of Tabletop Board Games and D&D RPG Campaigns, from dice bags and dice trays to card holders, playmats, and more!

In our last update, I was talking about stock and what we want to take down there, enough so we have something for everyone, but we don't want to come home with as much as we take. This has lead to us looking at the stall itself. UKGE provide you with the space, then its over to you for what else you want, your stall booking literally just gets you the space, no walls or floor coverings etc, no lights or power, everything else is an upcharge so be prepared for that.

I don't think we're going to bother with the expenses of buying walls, as one thing we will need is shelving for the stock, we can use that as the back "wall" of the stall. The stall frontage will be some combination of tables, we've only got 2m deep to play with so I'm guessing we put the table to the edge of the 2m line, and then customers are in the corridor when they want to interact with us. I've watched a few videos from different cons and that seems to be the normal for smaller footprint stores. If we assume the table is 90cm wide, and the shelves are 50cm wide that leaves a cozy 60cm for us to sit/stand in (yes I am 100% taking some folding chairs, it's been 15 years since I stood on my feet for 10+ hours a day!). I foresee an Ikea trip in our future (after the easter holidays when you can actually get into the car park) to nab some Ivar shelves.

There is of course the hope the other stalls around us have walls, and UKGE is keen for stallholders to get in touch and share information like this, so they split the costs of buying walls etc, but we've still not had the OK that the floor plan is finalized so that's not an option just yet. I'm also holding off on ordering any flyers etc until we get the stall number, I'd like to pop a flyer in any UK orders we get in the weeks preceding the expo, just to give a little notice it's happening, I know we wouldn't know it was a thing if we were not in some board game facebook groups.

One thing we will be doing next time we have a day off is a dummy stall build, so tape off a 3m x 2m area, on the patio or drive probably as we don't have that floor space in the house anywhere, and just get a rough idea of layout. I have some 30cm x 30cm tabletop "cubes" that would give us a nice ledge to stand behind, and allow us to hang stuff off, I'd like to build that up to above head height on one side to give us a bit of "backstage" space for stuff like snacks- time for the trusty holiday cool box to make its UK debut- this cooler box has survived 18 plane trips across the Atlantic, will it survive a car ride and 3 days in Birmingham?

Displaying the playmats will be the biggest stall challenge I think. It'll need testing, but we have a hanging rail so I was considering hanging the playmats off that, if you imagine how the posters in HMV used to be displayed back in the day? Then we can have rolled up ones behind us to give to folks who want to buy them. No idea if we'll have the space, but we won't know until we test!

So our current task list is decide which dice tray designs to take, and how to lay the stall out. Sounds easy when you put it like that...