Tales From the Showfloor: A First Time for Everything

Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 3/14/2005

Every year, tens ¡ª if not hundreds ¡ª of thousands of entrepreneurs in every industry imaginable enter the marketplace for the very first time with the product or service they hope will change the world, and make them a fortune. Often their very first stop is a tradeshow floor. Every story is different; here are a few accounts of exhibitors who took that first, brave step.

Just months after inventing and launching her fantasy game ¡ª called "If You Had To Choose ...?" ¡ª Susan Morry hit the tradeshow floor, first at the Canadian Toy & Hobby Fair in Toronto Jan. 29¨C31, then making the leap to the much larger American Intl. TOY FAIR in New York Feb. 20¨C23.

She didn't decide to exhibit at the shows until December. That wasn't a problem for the Toronto show, but she would have been relegated to a bad location at the New York show had she not scooped up a cancellation in the show's game zone. To make up for the fact that her company wasn't listed in the show directory, Morry spent $4,000 for an ad in the show daily. She also ended up hiring a booth assistant to handle traffic.

Morry said she over-prepared, taking 250 press kits to New York when 100 would probably have been enough. But there were still a few surprises along the way. "I was scrambling like crazy. In my case, there was a lot of luck involved," she said.

Morry, whose game invites players to make decisions based on their priorities and values, expected that she'd be writing orders rather than collecting leads. And she didn't realize how much energy she'd have to expend.

Luckily, she has no shortage of enthusiasm when it comes to the game, inspired by questions she asked her students during her years as a high-school teacher. "You really have to have extreme passion about your product. You really have to believe in it, because no less than a hundred times a day, you are literally trying to sell your product to the person. You really have to convince them that it's a fabulous product, it's innovative and they absolutely have to have it," she said.

Morry is still following up on her leads, but already has an order from toysrus.com to add to her agreement with Indigo Books & Music, a Canadian store chain. The burgeoning entrepreneur is brimming with ideas on how to get her game noticed, but has decided to stick with the toy shows next year, again in a 10¡ä¡Á10¡ä booth. "I don't think you need a big booth until you're really doing well," she said.

¡ªMargo McCall

Kristin Russell and David Bousquet had never heard of NATPE 2005 ¡ª or ever been to a tradeshow, for that matter ¡ª when they won two tickets to attend the annual convention and exhibition of the Natl. Assn. of Television Program Executives.

In their last year of a film program at San Francisco's Academy of Arts, the pair made two short movies that won first and fifth place in a NATPE-sponsored student competition. Besides the two convention passes, Russell and Bousquet earned $3,000 for themselves and $3,000 for the school.

They had something to spend it on too.

Over the last year, the pair put together Explore Cinema Tours ¡ª San Francisco. They got the idea when a tour video company hired them to shoot some footage of the city.

"It was really boring," said Russell. Shooting their own, more interesting tour movie, they decided, would give them a chance to show off their cinematography skills, more quickly and at less expense than it takes to produce a narrative film.

Explore offers a visual guide of San Francisco from the perspective of three adventurous travelers: one driving a racecar through the streets; one speeding a powerboat around the bay; and one piloting a helicopter over the city.

With the San Francisco episode in the can, Russell and Bousquet decided to do more than just attend NATPE; they'd pay for a booth and exhibit Explore Cinema Tours under their production company name, RedGate Films, with the goal of finding someone to finance further episodes.

Buyers at NATPE thought the project was beautiful, but they weren't buying.

"If there's one thing I learned," Russell said, "it's that TV is about quantity versus quality. People would tell me they had 10,000 hours (of programming) to fill, and they needed us for a minimum of 26."

With just one 24-minute episode ¡ª and no resources for making any more ¡ª RedGate wasn't offering the type of product most NATPE buyers want.

The show wasn't a complete waste of time though. Besides being a good learning experience ("We had to answer a lot of questions we'd never been asked before," said Russell), RedGate has three potential production projects in the works from contacts made there.

"I don't regret exhibiting at NATPE for our first time, but if we were going to a film market, we'd walk the floor before exhibiting," Russell said.

¡ªHeidi Genoist

In the case of Steve's Hitch, necessity wasn't exactly the mother of invention; Steve was. And he wasn't really the mother in the family; he was the son. Steve Gerres and his parents, Fran and Diane, constitute the management, manufacturing, marketing and sales teams for the company with the catchy name all rolled into one.

Back home in Belle Plaine, Minn., Fran and Steve, 19, work at a local farmer's co-op.

"There are a lot of vehicles there," Fran Gerres said, "and we had to figure out a way to move them around quicker."

So (Dad claims), the younger Gerres came up with an idea for a portable hydraulically operated trailer hitch that can fit on most any tractor, truck or piece of heavy equipment; then attach and detach in a matter of seconds. It seemed like a good idea, but it still took three years to refine the design, get a patent, and talk a neighbor into buying the first one.

"We were rookies at everything we did," Fran said.

But the neighbor came back the next week for another one. In fact, they sold 30 before they ran out of neighbors.

"That's when I said we've got to get some exposure," Fran said.

His wife Diane went online in search of agriculture-related tradeshows.

"We took a second mortgage on the place, pulled a little bit of money out of our 401(k)," Fran said, "and here we are."

When he said that, the whole family was standing in the middle of their outside exhibit booth at World Ag Expo on a cold, drizzly day in early February in Tulare, Calif.

During the three-day show, they didn't actually take any orders, "but everybody's been real positive," Fran said at the time.

From there, the Gerreses moved on to The Rental Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. They returned home the following week, with 20 orders for the equipment they were selling for a "show price" of $2,400 to $3,200, to find their voice mail full of requests for more information, enough positive reinforcement to plan to return to both shows next year.

"It's been unreal," Diane said. "Now I'm checking out boat shows and RV shows. I think that's going to be our next goal."

¡ªMichael Hart