Lessons Learned: Running A Small Booth At Gen Con

Gen Con 2023 finished about a week and a haf ago and after a long drive back, unpacking, and a flight out to my “please let’s do our vacation after Gen Con” vacation, I wanted to share the tips, ins & outs, and finances of running a booth at Gen Con. Also note this was our first time exhibiting at Gen Con in about 5 years. We stopped after 2018 because the drive is a bit long and the Marshalling Yard (the staging area before you can go to the dock & unload) always gives me somewhat irrational concerns–I hate being stuck there. Sure enough, even though I got to the marshalling yard at about 9:30am on Wednesday, a tractor trailer by the dock got stuck, so we all had to wait nearly an hour anyway.

Before I go any further, it was great to see some many folks again (I personally saw two folks from my gaming groups of 20-ish years ago) and to meet so many people excited to talk about & play games! It is always a great experience being able to share what we all love.

Finances

Was exhibiting at Gen Con worth it? Likely yes, but not resoundingly yes. So here is that quick breakdown of the costs of running the booth with round numbers.

~$3500 Booth fee & insurance & extra table & electricity for a small 10×10 corner booth. (A non-corner would be about 30% less.)
~$2500 for 2 Hotel rooms close to the convention.
~$1500 Travel for 4 people to come to the convention, two flying & two driving (separately).
~$500 Meals at the con for the group of 4.

So that makes the costs about $8000. But if we want to really break even, there is a print cost to every product we sell. (And in theory some design & development cost should be assigned to each item sold also.) So you’d want to make above $10,000–and perhaps above $11,000 or $12,000 to truly break even. While I’m not comfortable sharing specific numbers, we finished somewhere in that $10-12K range. (That’s not including the taxes we collected that have to go straight over to Indiana, unfortunately.)

Intangibles

Then you have to consider all the intangible costs: time to pack, travel, work the booth at the con, travel back, & unpack. And compare that to the intangible benefits: networking with customers & other industry folks, getting the word out about our products which folks may buy later (or buy more of later). Also we likely make later software sales because we were only demo-ing our Worldographer map software–selling license codes at the con is cumbersome and the program has a free version that we encourage people to try.

Areas to Improve

Every year in hindsight you’re going to recognize some things that could be better. And some things you wanted to do, but couldn’t. Here is a list of what I’d like to do next time:

A 10×10 booth is small for us with 50+ products among 5 product lines, especially if we’re also demo-ing our map software Worldographer. We’ll try to go to a 10×20, but that will depend on the Gen Con exhibitor gods–the hall is full and upgrades are limited.
I could have saved about $200 on the booth by bringing my own extra table & tablecloths for both mine & the included one, but I wanted to be able to leave the hall quickly, in one dolly trip. I might change that going forward too. It actually would be cheaper to buy two folding tables & leave them there if they’d cause me to make an extra dolly trip (see below for more on that).
While we probably won’t change our hotel situation, you might be able to save money by getting a hotel a few miles away and driving in. But after you pay for parking or rides each day, I’m not sure how much you save.
We likely should do some advertising. One cost I didn’t list was about $200 of facebook ads we tried. In years past we did a program book ad or a coupon book ad, but because we weren’t renewing to get into the exhibit hall, by the time we did get accepted, those ads were full. Those costs will likely be $1000-$2000. Perhaps even more. I don’t think the facebook ads added much value. While some folks reported seeing them, I think they were moreso speaking of our regular facebook ads and not the Gen Con ones specifically.
I forgot to put out some post-its with pricing next to some of the products. One product line’s prices vary quite a bit, so we spent too much time telling people the prices of each. (Less time to talk about the content of the products.) We do have a couple pricing sheets in plastic stands on the table, but having the prices right next to each product is more clear.
We didn’t take any pictures! Seeing how other companies use them even after Gen Con for social media is a missed opportunity.

What We Did Well

Things we did well/better than in years past (while this was our first Gen Con in a few years, we have been doing Origins & PAX Unplugged):

Only putting a little over half of our products to sell in the booth on set up day. This let us see how things were selling and bring more of the things that were selling better than expected, and more importantly on Saturday evening take back extra product that we new wasn’t going to sell on Sunday. We took a full dolly out Saturday night, which let us pack everything up on one dolly after tear-down. That let us avoid needed to use the Marshalling Yard to get to the docks and load up.
Good signage: We had banners behind us explaining each of the product lines and little helper cards also quickly explaining the products.
Not really new for Gen Con, but I’m happy now with how we present the products on several sets of little shelves. Until we got those, we tried a few different ways to show the many card decks & dice sets we have and until the shelves it wasn’t great.
I feel we’ve got good “elevator pitches” for each of our product lines. We can distill each down to just a few sentences that I think are quick & enticing.
And I’m sure there is a bunch more we did well, but you tend to notice the things to improve more than the successes.

One More Thing to Improve

One other area for improvement is first day sales. Our sales on day one were about half the sales we did at our last Gen Con–5 years ago. Friday was a little better, then Saturday had a big jump that mostly made up for it. While many of those were people who didn’t come to the exhibit hall on Thursday or Friday, many folks did swing by and check things out on the early days then come back on Saturday or Sunday.

But for everyone who did find us again, I’m sure another person truly did want to find us again (not just saying “oh, I’ll come back” as a polite way to move on–which I’m sure happened as well) and didn’t because we had a few folks in the last hour or two on Sunday say, “Finally, I found you again.” We also do have folks who buy one or two of our products, check them out that night and then come back later in the con to buy a few more. If we can get more people to buy on day 1 (or 2) then we’re more likely to have folks come back.

So some sort of a first day promo is something we’ll likely do in the future. The idea is something we’ll have each day (I don’t wnat folks to miss out completely) but the day one option will likely be the best.