ABC Show 2011

The ABC Show is the largest annual domestic trade show for juvenile, infant and maternity products. Every possible thing you have ever thought about purchasing for your kids (and a lot of stuff that you haven't even heard of) is at this show. Fisher Price, Graco, Chicco, Nuby, Nuk, Boppy, Bright Stars, Munchkin and The First Years are just some of the "big boys" that exhibit at this show every year.  There are tens of thousands of attendees--including everything from Exhibitors, Vendors, Retailers and Big-Box Buyers, Distributors, Sales Reps and Agents, Media, Special Services Personnel and Guests. Baby Banana Brush has had the opportunity to attend this show for the past three years, and many of our major clients found us as a result of our presence at the show. This year the show was held in Louisville, instead of the usual Las Vegas destination, so the attendance was a little bit less than usual. However, despite the lower number of international attendees and regular customers, we still feel that we had a very successful show. We placed lots of orders and we worked very hard, now we are busy with all of the follow-up that comes after attending a show of this magnitude. 

 We did have a little bit of downtime for some "monkey business" in the booth.

 We passed out LOTS of samples of our new product, The Baby Sharky Brush.

 I asked Moms if we could snap pictures of their babies using the brush whenever I could.

 Babies using and enjoying the product is truly the best marketing we could ask for.

There were MANY people who came by the booth saying, "I just saw a baby over there going to town on one of these things", or "I've seen these before, my neighbor/sister/friend's baby has one", etc.

 Our theme this year was "Sharks" but we tried to mesh it with our Banana Brush theme too. Having this big Shark cut-out was only scary for us inside the booth (just kidding). It actually made a lot of passers-by take a second look at our booth.

Here's how the booth looked at the end of set-up on our first night. We were right next to a lot of really big retailers, but the layout this year was weird, so some people had a hard time finding us. 

 Janet was our dutiful accountant and she worked very hard all week long. Getting up early, going to bed late, long hours on our feet without eating, making lots of compromises, having to keep many different clients information straight, and staying organized amid mild chaos were challenging for all of us, but Janet did a great job of managing everything.

At the end of the day, we barely had enough energy to eat dinner before crashing into bed. We thought we should do at least one notable thing while we were in Louisville, so we asked our taxi driver to take us to Churchill Downs, which is the huge racetrack where the Kentucky Derby is held each year. We expected this to be in the middle of a rural area surrounded by green, rolling hills--we were wrong. It is in the middle of two major freeways and it is surrounded by dilapidated, cramped, old-looking houses. The building itself was very pretty, and spread out over many acres. The surrounding neighborhood was shady at best. Our cab driver said the people who live there charge like $20 per car for parking and when the Derby is going on they can make about $6,000 per day. You'd think they could use some of that to touch up their peeling paint and dangling roof shingles. I guess not. 

All in all, we worked hard, had some success and bonded while we were in Kentucky last week.