Thanksgiving Point – the Happiest Wedding Store on Earth!

As you may have guessed, the wedding show that we did in September was quite a success…well…we have only signed one or two contracts so far, but I think it’s pretty inevitable that more success will come. It’s been so long though, and I wanted to finish the posting of the story of all of our fun before I forget everything that happened.

To start things off, we decided to keep the design simple for this show. We weren’t going to load up the booth with dozens and dozens of small things, including all the countless 8×10 photos we’ve strung up in some fascinating ways in the past. When we started these Expo’s, a friend of Jon’s who works in the trade show industry, lent us the booth and supplies worth upwards of $15,000. We had some one-foot-by-one-foot square, 9-foot high steel scaffolding pieces that bolted together to form the skeleton of our booth. Then we had some four foot wide wall panels that wired to the framework of the booth. You could erect the frame walls in front of, or behind the scaffolding, but because we liked the industrial look, we left the beams exposed, and then even learned to hang lights from the vertical crossbars nine feet up. I hung flowers from some of the legs of the booth as well, so that was fun. They lent us padding and carpet, lights and cleaning supplies, extension cords, and even blankets to keep everything from scratching during transport. They were extremely supportive and generous! Heaven bless the Cottons! The walls could be polished to a shiny gleaming black, and then we had sticky velcro to adhere Jon’s photos right to the walls. The whole thing worked like a charm and made us look extremely professional and grand. The only problem with the display was that it was big, heavy, and took three round-trip journeys to get it from the warehouse to the show and back, and that didn’t include all of our furniture. For that first show, we bought a coffee table and console table and brought along the big red couch for effect. The effect worked, but it took a lot of heavy lifting! and a couple of tanks of gas!

The carpet, padding, and big walls were the first things to go. Our feet were a bit sore after that first show with no soft carpeting, but I figured out a way to hang the 8×10 photos right to the curtain at the back of our booth. They shone and glittered as small breezes made them shiver and they really caught the eye. It worked out pretty well, and we were down to two trips for the scaffolding and only two trips for the furniture. Hmm. The right leg of scaffolding and the big red couch were the next things to go. We’d bought a little white Ikea couch for a photo shoot we had done, and took that couch instead of the big red one, and we had the shape of an L to the booth instead of a U now. Whew. Down to three trips total. Finally, last year, as I was pregnant with Hannah, we started to realize that the beams and cross-bars were just too much to handle. It was such a hassle too to try and coordinate with the warehouse to get the beams out, and then again to return them, and still needing three trips back and forth to Thanksgiving Point was starting to wear on us. I was able to pull apart the booth myself while Jon and the others loaded trucks and took a load or two back home, but that September show was the last one with the industrial display. Maybe it was BECAUSE I attempted the manual labor while six months pregnant, but Jon vetoed the use of the scaffolding after that.

January found us with an interesting problem! How to decorate the booth and display Jon’s photos without our standard scaffolding system? We had helped with a theme wedding the year before that was held on Friday the 13th. The couple had wanted something that would nod to the superstitions of the day, but that wouldn’t be outright goofy and that would make people roll their eyes as they walked through the door to the reception. Instead of a regular archway for the receiving line to stand in front of, we built them a set of three ladders. Two of the ladders stood vertical to either side, then the third ladder, built just a little thinner than the others, became a cross-beam between the other two. It was a square arch made of ladders that was painted entirely black. They loved it. We hung some tulle over the arch and no one was really aware that the newlyweds were standing under black ladders on Friday the 13th. It was a hit. After the wedding, those ladders sat in our garage for some time…why not pull them out and use those as our cross-system from which to string some ribbon and post photos? It worked, but we still had to make a couple of trips back and forth just because the ladders and supports were long and unwieldy. At least they weren’t hundreds of pounds each like the steel supports had been. We tried to coordinate them at the next show to make it home in one trip, and despite all of our combined Tetris skills, when the guys were able to fit EVERYTHING from the booth into the truck and one car…except for those ladders…they left the ladders in the dumpster at Thanksgiving Point.

We had to have something for the next show, so our friend Jim, who constantly goes out of his way to be such a good friend and support to us, had an engineering inspiration. He convinced his brother-in-law to help him, and soon we had three ladders that hinged in the middle and could be broken down to fit into someone’s trunk! They were perfect! Thanks Jim!

For several shows now, we have used old or new ladders and I had a brainwave of my own. I bought a cheap curtain rod at Ikea, (bless Ikea once again) and I extended it to be that horizontal cross to the ladders…but underneath the bottom rungs. With the vertical ladders, the horizontal top ladder and the curtain rod, I had a perfect square and could run ribbon in any direction. We kept it going up and down, and I tied seven straight lines in fire red ribbon, top to bottom between each of the rungs, and there we had our canvas. We had mounted Jon’s photos on boards to keep them crisp and strong, but they were also very light, so those only needed a couple of pieces of double-sided tape to hang them right to the ribbon and create a grid of about 30 of his pictures. We placed a couple of his enlargements on easels, put flowers in several corners, and begged a couple of different sources for some fake cakes to use in our display as well. It looked great! At the last show we did this spring, I even had two separate people ask if they could take a picture of the display because it looked so good. The compliment made my pride swell, so of course, I said, “Sure!”

Little did I know that one of those photos was snapped by a competing vendor! She ended up with a booth at this September show, not two spaces from the location we had used at the spring show. There she sat with two dozen 8×10 photos pasted to a system of ribbons strung from the rear curtain of her space. She had a little couch in front of the ribbons and a table out front with her plaque on it and cards displayed for distribution. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at! Someone stole my idea! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, but to plagiarize the design and then sit two steps away from where we very likely could have been?…that’s pretty gutsy if you ask me! She didn’t even copy it really well! Her ribbon just hung from the curtain supplied by the event coordinators, and her display table cut off any option of people coming into the booth to hang out on the couch to look through her work. I guess she was depending on the displayed pictures being enough of a draw, (even though most of them were the same bride). Best of luck to her, and I’m flattered that she stole from me, but how awkward would it have been if we’d wound up sitting next to each other with the same booth design?…only our booth would have been bigger, better, and more comfortable! Poor thing. If you’re a photographer with no original thought, you’re going to run out of work sooner or later. I took Jon by her space towards the end of the show and he just laughed. He stopped and talked to her too and ended up complimenting her on the design. She had the decency to look a little bit flustered, but smiled and thanked him. My jaw dropped that he had complimented her, but then he reminded me as we walked away that he had complimented the DESIGN…which was originally mine anyway, so really he’d been complimenting ME, not her. He he he.

For this show, we decided to really step up our game and make a better and cleaner showing of ourselves. We brought the ladders, small couch, coffee table and console table, but everything else was different. I did string ribbon, but this time it was white. There were pictures hanging from the ladder system, but instead of 30 8×10’s, there were only two 16×20’s in lovely frames. We picked up a few more decorative easel’s, and Jon had three more enlargements made of some of his favorite and most impressive pictures, and we left it at that. It may seem odd to have a 20×30 gallery wrap print of some other bride in my house, but it really is just a beautiful picture! And he got so many compliments on the work.

Another difference at this show was my preparation for it. My routine in the past was to stop at Costco the night before the show, pick up three or four bouquets of whatever looked good, and then throw together two bouquets and decorate one cake with whatever I’d happened to get, and if there was anything left over, I’d improvise. Not this time. I still stopped at Costco and picked up three bouquets of roses, but that was just the filler to the rare and different flowers I had ordered a month in advance and had picked up from my wholesaler before stopping at Costco. I had cybidium orchids, artichokes, mums, four-foot calla lilies, and more. I used beaded leaves, Chinese paper lanterns, and a cameo locket necklace of my mothers to make my arrangements stand out. I even used some silver wire to turn a basic red rose bouquet into a fireworks display. It was liberating and fun! And, I got several compliments on my work and several requests to take pictures of certain parts. Again, my pride forced me to smile and say, “Sure!” How funny would it be to get hired for a wedding and have the bride send me a picture of my own work as an illustration of what she wants?

We also broke down and got the greatest baker in the world to join us! Okay…I haven’t compared Laree to all the other bakers in the world just yet, but she’s pretty darned amazing even compared to the beautiful work we have seen throughout the business! I was hired to do the flowers for a spring wedding and the bride told me that the baker she had hired lived up the street from me and that she would send me her information so that I could coordinate getting the flowers to her for the cake. The next Sunday, Laree approached me at church and mentioned that she’d heard we were going to be working together. YOU!? It’s YOU!? YAY! Come to find out, Laree had been decorating cakes for 15 years and she was amazingly good at it! Not only could she make roses out of icing, but she could pipe, paint freehand, as well as cut cakes into the most intricate shapes before icing them. Laree CAN work with fondant, but she can also frost a cake with butter cream and leave it so smooth that you would think it was fondant. Awesome! After that first cake experience, I asked her if she wanted any more business, which she shrugged at and said, “Sure.” I bet she thought I was kidding, or that I was just saying I’d send her work as a nice gesture, but then I’d never have to follow through with it. Well, guess what, lady?! I sent her three more cakes, and they all turned out beautifully and were SO tasty. It was so wonderful to be involved in a relationship with a baker that not only did good, consistent work, but who was right up the street and didn’t have to hem and haw about pricing. She knew her work, what it took to do different aspects of the job, and she flat out charged what it took. …but being a stay-at-home mom meant that she didn’t have to pay overheard either, and her prices reflected that too. She was perfect for our company! We asked Laree to join us, and not only did she make two beautiful cakes for the tradeshow, she was in the booth with us through most of the show…right there promoting herself as well as us…it was amazing!

And, speaking of amazing…the cakes she made?! WOW! The first one was a pretty standard clean white butter-cream frosted cake. It was three tiers and square, but she left if blank for me to add flowers to. Flowers die overnight, so I did a different arrangement for both days of the show, and Jon got pictures of both arrangements, so now Laree and I both have two more photos for our portfolios. The second cake that she brought …took the cake! He he he. She had asked me earlier, just what she ought to do to display in the booth. I gave her all kinds of ideas and websites to visit, but one thing stuck in her mind, and she followed it through beautifully. I mentioned taking something normal from your home…a pillow with a fun pattern, wrapping paper, or a lace handkerchief…and using that to design your cake. Then you could also display a picture or an article next to the cake and explain to people the connection. It’s a really great way to carry a theme through an event, and she liked that idea. She went to Martha Stewart’s website and noticed that they had a Wedgewood cake, and she loved that idea, so she pulled out her own china pattern from when she was married, and she decorated a soft cream colored fondant covered cake in the loveliest and most amazing flower pattern that was exactly like her china. It was gorgeous…and what a great story to tell the brides walking passed our booth! Whew! What a great blessing to have a baker that we can depend on and send consistent business to without having to worry about anything at all!

Of course, Michelle joined us again, and it’s always fun to hang out with her and hear her talk about videography and the 6th grade class that she teaches. She’d had a really tough week leading up to the show, so she felt pretty unprepared, and was a little grouchy at first, but she took a few breaks to walk with Hannah around the show, and that always lifted her spirit. That’s one of the things Hannah is best at.

Acutally, Michelle booked a gig right there at the show, so even if she wasn’t feeling as prepared as she’d wanted to be, she found the value of her work pretty quickly. Actually, she found some value in her obsessions too!…this mom asked Michelle if she had a certain wedding date available…and Michelle had to pause. Well?…that’s the BYU vs. University of Utah game…what time is the wedding? The mom burst out laughing and said that they were huge Utah fans too…so much so that they were having the wedding in the morning, eating lunch as a family, and then everyone, including the bride and groom were going to the stadium to watch the game! Perfect! Michelle agreed to the schedule and said that she’d even try to get her camera into the stadium to continue the video of the couple watching the came and cheering in their gown and tuxedo. If she can’t get the video camera in, then we’ll just get some regular cameras through so that she can catch at least some still shots to end the show with. Maybe we’ll have some t-shirts made up too that say “I got married today and THIS is my honeymoon!” He he he. Go Utes! Go Michelle!

The show was pretty standard for us, except that I felt a sort of surge of everything being fresh. I felt good standing there talking to new people about what we do because everything that we had on display was beautiful and new and exciting, and that made it easy to get excited about discussing it. Michelle and Laree were stellar salesmen as well, but Jon, as always, was the star. He really is just so good with people! He was so in his element to be pitching something that he’s passionate about, and so many people responded to his great personality as well as his talent, and it made the whole show such fun. He’s awesome. I got me a good one.

Hannah was a trooper, but you could tell that she was extremely bored after the first couple of hours, and two full days of the show started to get to her. We’ll have to get a babysitter for her at the next show. She’ll be walking by then anyway, so she’s not going to be held back to sit quietly in the booth or nap in her carseat under the console table while we work. Ah, well. Maybe I’ll set up a small area for her next to us where she can play so that people can still see how freaking adorable she is and so that our joke about renting her out as a professional flower girl is all the more believable. We’ll have to see where things stand in January.

As the show wore on, we had one couple that kept swinging by. They circled the show more than three times, which took them all day on Saturday. I laughed every time they came by because they really were a fun couple, and they were very open about telling me how impressed they were with us. It started because they had a couple of questions that they’d thrown out to a couple of other vendors at the show, and those vendors had been politic about their answers, sidestepping the real question, and not giving away anything really useful. When the couple got to me, they were expecting similar non-answers, so when I just started rambling on and on with ideas that fed into each other and options to their queries and honest answers to their problems, they were floored. They stood there for nearly an hour talking about different aspects of what they wanted and how to go about getting the wedding that they were dreaming up, taking notes on ideas I was willing to share. Their second trip around, they came in and sat in the booth going through all of the photo albums to see Jon’s work and to ask me more questions about flowers. Their third trip was only a short one, pausing to look at some of the enlargements and point at a bouquet again before moving on. But, the fourth visit was at the end of the show and they sat down again and for another hour. We got into more and more detail about what they wanted and how we could help them. They promised that they were definitely going to use us for basically everything and that we would be hearing from them! No, they haven’t called yet, but they’re not getting married for a year still, so there’s some time to hammer out more details soon enough.

Once the brides and grooms were gone, we started breaking down the booth; cutting ribbons and stacking photos and easels. Jim had come at the end to help carry everything back out to his truck and our cars, and Laree’s Husband Brent had come as well. We’ve never packed up so quickly! Still, at one moment, as Jim looked down at Hannah on the couch, he got a fright. Apparently, I’d turned my back and Hannah started to roll off. Jim saw the progression, but found himself in slow motion and couldn’t save Hannah before she bumped into my leg and landed on the concrete floor, noggin down. Ouch! She started howling, so I took her outside while the men kept packing, and hugged her and let her cry. I tried to comfort her, but you could tell that she really had bonked herself good and she just wanted to get it all out and cry for a while. I had so many ladies from the show come by and check on us…one of them so worried about a concussion and who kept telling me to watch for her eyes to dilate and warning me to take her to the emergency room at the drop of a hat. Two other moms had been to some sort of convention that they kept mentioning as they “drew the bad energy away” from Hannah’s cheek with their hands. They’d rub their own hands together, then swipe at the air near Hannah’s tears, and they kept cooing and mumbling to her as they worked. I’m not knocking the unknown, but it seemed pretty silly…especially when they decided they were done and congratulated themselves on making her better. How do you do a control study of something like that?! She really was fine. We gave her some Tylenol when we got home, and sat with her for the rest of the night and just watched tv.. She must have had a scare, and was dealing with a ringing headache, but she didn’t act lethargic or drugged, she just wanted to be held. She was tired and hurt…so was I! Jon agreed to give her a blessing, and then we let her sleep with us so that we could wake her up every couple of hours and make sure that she was able to focus on us before falling back to sleep, but we both felt that it was just a precaution when there really was nothing to worry about. She ended up with one little pink scuff mark at the top of her cheek near her left eye, and that was gone in a day or two as well. She was right as rain on Sunday, and there have been no adverse affects from the bonk. I think bouncing off my leg first cushioned the fall and it wasn’t as bad as anyone assumed. Heck, the same week I saw several children on both sides of our families with blood-crusted chins or foreheads sporting stitches from their own accidents. Hannah’s wounds were minimal when compared with everyone else!

So, aside from Hannah’s drama and the stolen booth design, I think we had a very successful showing! YAY for Thanksgiving Point!

One really flattering thing about this show was being voted best booth! Jon had joked with several potential brides and grooms about voting for us…I think because one of THEM brought it up…but we never believed that it was a real thing. Jon just assumed that they were a fun couple spouting entertaining jibes in response to his wit. Well…he was partly right, but the vote was sincere after all! We actually tied with another photographer as favorite booth of the show, and I was so happy when I got the call a week after the event! I called Jon right away and spilled the exciting compliment to him, and I sent emails to Laree and Michelle to let them share in the fun too. Also, as part of the reward for being voted best, we received a significant discount off our next booth rental. YAY! We used the reward as our down payment for the January show, and now it will be that much less expensive to join in again and test out our new and improved look. What a compliment! We really learned a lot and had a good time at the September Bridal Expo…now we’ll have to wait and see how well people enjoyed our work and if it earns us any weddings. It’s only been two weeks since I sent out the last email, but maybe I’ll send another this weekend just to check in with the brides and grooms.

Thanks again, Thanksgiving Point! We’ll see you in January!

~ by bylorena on October 15, 2008.