THE ROAD TO THE EXPO- TRAYED UP

Best get a roll on...

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!

Not long to go now- 23 days as of this post! I feel like progress is being made, albeit it slower than I imagined, but that's actually a good thing considering the amount of space stock is taking up, in the case of some stuff the longer it's left flat the better! 

Since our last update we've made the Ikea trip and sorted the stall out (to a point!). We've ended up hiring 2 tables from the Expo, worked out about £25 with fees and VAT etc, but to save the space in the car those would take up that seems like a fair trade off. We have our own two padded folding chairs from Costco we've had for years (just need to remember to pop those in the car with all the stock, that would be a disaster!), and we've picked up an Ivar shelf from Ikea.

Ikea had some metal racking options, and some "garage" style shelves, but ultimately the wooden Ivar seemed the best in terms of cost (£50 for the sides and 3 shelves) and more importantly weight in the car. We'll just need a screwdriver to assemble it on site, and hopefully we'll sell enough stock that we can just pop it back in the car assembled on the drive home! We have various collapsible boxes for the stock, and two hand dolly style trollies to shift it all into the venue.

So our 2 tables will form an L shape with the long "L" to the front, with a 1ft gap to get in and out of the stall, and the short "L" to the side will give us some backstage tabletop space, then the Ivar shelf runs being us, giving us a 3ft square to sit in (it's going to be cosy!), but the chairs do fold up if we want the standing space. I hope this will work! 

I'm still pondering about how to display the playmats, and having resigned the fact we don't have space for a hanging rail for them, I'm still wondering if we can hang them up on shelf hangers, one of each design, and then have rolled stock to give to people. The other option would just be to fan them out as a stack a bit like a huge flip book, but that will take up quite a bit of room, and also they will be scuffed by the end of the show.

Other stock is coming along nicely, and I just had delivered the majority of the cellophane bags this week to start "retail packing" everything. I know plastic packaging is a bit of a taboo at the moment, but it gets so dirty in there I don't want to damage stock, and the paper options were either not see through (not ideal!) or very expensive, so I've settled on recycled cello bags, that can then be re-recycled, with then paper carrier bags as it doesn't matter if they're not see through. 

To date I've got 225 bags, and 75 press stud dice trays, plus various assortments of card rails, coasters, patches, playmats and stickers. After much trepidation (which you'll see in previous posts) I think I've decided on all the dice tray designs to take. I've gone for a mix of trays to match some of the bags we're taking, along with some more generic patterns, and a few game specific ones such as Bloodbowl and Nemesis, along with Cthulhu themed ones for Arkham dice based games. 

Jobs this week are to start packing up stock, and go through the handy checklist the expo have put on their website. Oh, and keep making stock! On we roll...