Linda, Kaylee, and Daniel at the after party

Originally uploaded by bitpusher

Last weekend we exhibited at LinuxFest NorthWest. It was pretty exciting, since this was the first time we’d actually had a booth and marketing schwag at an event. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

As these things go, the preparation was pretty intense. Between the time we signed up for our booth, and 10 days prior to the conference, we didn’t have much time to plan for the event. At T-10 days, we decided we wanted stickers and T-shirts.

With 8 days left, I called up Robert Kaule over at essensys, who also owns a silk screening business. I asked him to make it happen on time. Being an engineer first, and a screen-printer second, his response was “no problem, I’ll have to bill you for overnight delivery “.

Getting the T-shirts done was the easiest marketing project we’ve ever stumbled through. I had to stumble through AI a bit as our graphics designer was unavailable, but that wasn’t too painful.

Our shirts looked fantastic and were a big hit at the festival. Every woman who stopped by our table was thrilled we’d ordered baby-doll tees, and all the men were happy we had their size, no matter what it was. We were more or less out of shirts by 11am on the second day.

We ordered 175 shirts, and were only able to keep 5 for ourselves. We ordered a small quantity in every size from Sm - 4XL for Men, and Sm - XL to Womens. For the next event we’re ordering three times as many in L-2XL for mens, and 3x as many in L-2XL for women, the rest of the sizes we’ll just double the order size.

We also ordered 500 stickers from stickergiant.com. They were great, but they are not engineers, and the process was a bit more alien to my analytical brain. After several circular questions, I finally just restated that I wanted 500 black stickers with my logo and URL on it, then it happened. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t choose the size of the stickers, or the color of the font, etc, and they were somewhat lackluster. Now we know better. (don’t let Michael do any graphics work! Have you seen his hair?)

The afterparty for the event was held at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA. Pizza and beer were the fare of the day, which we hardly noticed due to the awesome electronics laying around. They had everything from a Theremin to their own AM Radio station broadcasting the original War of the Worlds. Highlights of the event included a tesla coil, a vandegraph generator, and some old radios manufactured by a distant relative of mine during the ’40s.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under talks and presentations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.