Dragonmeet Retrospective 4: The Wrap Up

This is my fourth and final retrospective on attending Dragonmeet as a trader for the first time. If you’ve missed the earlier posts you can find part one here, part two here and part three here. In this post I want to try and provide a summary of how it went. Really though I’m here to ask the question of would I do it again?

The answer to that is a strong, but not definite, yes. Running the stall was an experience that I greatly enjoyed and based on the small but noticeable sales bump I’ve experienced over the following couple of weeks it has boosted my profile. It definitely boosted my ego and energy levels significantly, something that is always helpful during these dark months.

You might be wondering why my answer to the question isn’t 100% yes. There are a number of reasons.

The first is money. I didn’t make a profit from this event, though I wasn’t too far from it. This year I could afford that and I think the cost was worth it. I’ve no idea what sort of situation I’ll be in when trader registration opens in 2023 and if inflation continues as it has done the past few months then the costs may simply be too high for me.

The second reason is location, and relates back to the first. There is a strong possibility that the event will move to the Excel next year. It’s a bigger venue and provides the space needed the convention to grow but change also means prices may rise. It’s also just that little bit more awkward to get to compared to Hammersmith.

The final factor is novelty. I had six products on offer and most of them had never been sold at a convention before (and those that had weren’t necessarily prominent items). I can’t bank on those games selling well again next year which means I need new products. Realistically I probably need 2-3 new products. Minimum. That’s not an unrealistic goal for the year given my past output and there’s always a second option – sharing the stall space. This is something I’ve discussed with a couple of people and would allow for a wider selection of games. Alongside the various one off setup costs I had this year sharing the stall would significantly reduce my costs and make it easier to break even.

The downside is, of course, that more games doesn’t automatically mean more sales. By sharing the stall I could end up losing money simply by dividing the same amount of income across more people. It’s something I’ll need to consider carefully before coming to any decision and thankfully it’s one that I’m ok with leaving to future me to deal with.

In terms of what would I do different the list is surprisingly short. The main one is more obvious this is who I am / contact details which will be especially important if I share a stand. Second is less stock as I could have taken half of what I did and gone home with a nearly empty, rather than half empty, case. Finally, adding a vertical stand or two would have made better use of the space and have brought more items up to eye level.

All in all though I think that for my first time it went really well. Part of that was planning and part of it was observation. In the months running up to the convention I was checking the hashtags for major events to get a feel for how others presented their stalls. Combined with my own experience as a visitor to conventions I had a clear idea of how I wanted the stall to look. I also looked into what others had written about running stalls. The Technical Grimoire blog has a great series of posts looking at how they have redesigned their stall over multiple conventions which was really useful in identifying the areas I wanted to focus my attention on. I was a little surprised by how few of these posts there are, which is partially why I’ve written this little series.

So what’s next? Honestly, I don’t know. Dragonmeet is rather unique in the UK in terms of the audience it attracts and I will hopefully apply to be a trader there again next year. As for other conventions it would be nice to attend one in the summer but I’m not sure what the best fit would be for me right now. I would ideally like something focused on RPGs and with a good trade hall to make it worth attending. The exception would be anything local where I could just travel to it on the day. Now that I have built up some stock and without the cost of accomodation attending a smaller event as a trader becomes much more appealing and offers the opportunity to get my games in front of a different audience.

I hope that these posts have been useful to those of you that have read through them. They’ve been very off the cuff and a way to just record my thoughts about the convention. It’s been good to get back to regular blog posts, even if I have rambled on a little.

Dragonmeet Retrospective Part 2: The Stand

This is a multi-part retrospective and you can find the full series via these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

For this second post looking back at my first time attending Dragonmeet as a trader, I want to focus on my stand (part 1, focusing on sales is here). What went right, what went wrong and what I would do differently. So let’s start with a picture. This was my stand as I set it up on the Friday evening. With the exception of the banner, which I moved about a little, it’s also how it looked during the rest of the convention.

You can see immediately that it’s quite utilitarian. Six sets of zines, flanked by signs and leaflets on either end. Each zine has a little blurb that also states its price and number of players. While there is a copy of everything standing vertically the majority are lying flat on the table. Behind all that are copies of each product prepackaged in a card back envelope while my remaining stock was stashed behind the table.

So let’s start with the good and I’m going to immediately shift away from the table to this beauty: my roller banner. 

Seriously, I loved how well this came out and it really sells my brand. The images stand out, my company name is clear and it’s got useful information at the bottom. The only things missing are my name and email address, issues that are apparently blind spots of mine as they came up more than once.

With regards to the actual stand, I felt like the limited number of games worked in my favour – I had enough of a range to grab people’s attention but not so many that you couldn’t look at them all. It was also a small enough number of products that I could give a customer a quick rundown of everything without losing their attention, a fact that I believe contributed to a number of sales.

The blurbs turned out to be a star asset, especially when I had multiple people at the stall so definitely something to repeat. They’ll also be invaluable when I have a larger range on offer and have to focus my pitch on a subset of games.

The other factor that helped was that I had two clear themes. I repeated the phrase “can I interest you in sci-fi or spies?” so many times during the course of the day that it almost lost meaning by the end. But it’s a concise and clear pitch that worked. While my personal interests are wider than just these two genres I expect they will always be a primary focus so it’s useful to know that people can be drawn in with a focused sales pitch like this.

So what, in retrospect, didn’t work or would I do differently?

First up are the envelopes. I’d prepackaged a number of zines in the card-backed envelopes that I use for postage and added download codes directly to them. While customers seemed to appreciate this it did cause a little confusion, as people would pick things up to buy and then I’d put them back down and hand them an envelope. Once I’d explained they appreciated it but it was a little hitch that I could easily smooth out. The bigger issue is weight and space. Using the envelopes made my bag heavier than it needed to be, something I could have done without (and more about that in a bit).

As for the download codes again, a great idea but as they were just small slips of paper they’re easily lost. Next time I think I will print them on small stickers and just add them directly to the inside cover of each zine. Again, it’s an easy solution that just speeds things along.

Stock wise I brought far too much. I’d received advice from someone with experience that around 25 copies per product was a good number and with the exception of Numb3r Stations this would have been sufficient. How many copies did I bring? 40-50. Of everything. My case weighed a lot. Why did I do that? Honestly, a mix of “what if it’s super busy” panicking and because I had space in my case to do so. While I did manage it next year I’ll aim for fewer copies of each product and hopefully make life a little easier for myself.

What I could have used that space in my case for was some vertical stands. Compared to others my table was quite flat and below eye level. A vertical stand would have allowed me to put multiple items on display, at eye level, while also only using a small portion of the table space. I could have also used it to make the price lists more visible, as people seemed not to notice them.

One thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to get people to take a freebie. I had produced mini A6 leaflets containing the Home Amongst the Stars micro games and a sign-up to my next Kickstarter. People were really reluctant to take them and even when they were at the stall didn’t seem to realise they were free. If I print a solar leaflet next time then I’ll put some really big ‘FREE GAMES!’ signs next to them. I was also a little disappointed that while I did hand out 100-150 of these leaflets that’s translated to only ~5 signups on the Kickstarter page. Not a great conversion rate. I knew it would be hard but had hoped to get 10-20 new signups to the landing page.

The biggest issue with my setup though was the lack of contact details/indication of who I am. Of the six products, I had for sale on the stand the only one with a name on the cover wasn’t mine! To top this off I forgot to order extra business cards and quickly ran out of them and for some stupid reason didn’t add my contact details to the flyers. Not great given I was hoping to build awareness of who I am so it’s definitely something to go to the top of the planning checklist for next time.

Overall though I was very pleased with my stand setup, especially given it was my first time. I’ve attended a lot of conventions so I think I’ve subconsciously built up a picture of what I do and don’t like on a stand, which reflects where I focused my own attention on. For part 3 I want to reflect on the day itself then do a final roundup in part 4. I’ve had a lot of encouraging comments about part 1 so I hope that this is also useful to people considering running a convention stand.