At the end of each year's show, we make sure to walk around the convention center to "borrow" ideas from other booths. Since we design and construct our own booth every year, we had decided that this year we would do something completely different. Making our way to one of our favorite stores, Ikea, we picked up some shelving and with some help from local furniture designer, Ramon (www.autonomous-design.com free plug, yay!) we were able to have a fully mobile booth that could be loaded with all of our merchandise and rolled right into the convention center.
Once we had the booth assembled, it was time to do inventory and pack everything inside our mobile Ikea displays. We do most of our work inside of our storage unit here in San Diego. Everytime we roll up the doors to the storage unit a little tear rolls down my cheek because I know in the next hour or so I will be counting more shirts than I ever need to count in my life. For example, we just counted 480 lbs of Newgrounds shirts, that's right pounds!
Once we had all of our inventory packed and ready to move out, all that was left was to shrink wrap all 4 pre-loaded IKEA displays and get them onto our ultra-cool flatbed truck with a lift gate (no more back pains!). Sounds easier than it actually is, but with help from Tim, Chip, Dan, and Tom we were able to get everything on our truck as well as load a Budget van full of inventory to take over to the convention center.
In true independent fashion we avoid using the convention centers union labor at all costs, mainly due to the fact that we like to do things on the cheap. We unloaded in the parking structure across from the convention center. As soon as we started to roll our little Ikea friends across the street, we realized that, A) Comic-Con has started, and B) these IKEA shelves are badass! In a matter of 10 minutes the majority of the items that we needed for our booth were moved in! Some may call it "low-rent" we prefer "efficient".
As we begin to put some type of structure to our booth we quickly realize that we still have a crap load of things to accomplish. Thanks to our official 2007 photographer, John Pascual, we have this short time lapse of our booth being constructed.
Please take note of the blue blankets that are covering some of our merchandise in front of our booth. The reason I bring this up is because Wednesday morning when we arrived at our booth, they were missing! Who steals moving blankets! Come on people!
As Wednesday approached, we were about 50% complete with our booth. Preview Night starts at 7:00pm sharp, and we still had a lot to do.
