Update, our first show is coming up this Saturday and I’m super excited! We surprisingly didn’t get many vendors with animals so it’s leaning more heavily into the “metaphysical” side of the show.
It was unexpected for me but I’m happy to have a decent turnout of vendors either way, not many people are gonna be buying animals anyways so I think it should work out just fine.
If all goes well we will have another show in March and start looking at a second venue.
I’ll let y’all know how the show goes! Hopefully will have a video to post up to our YouTube channel too.
That’s super cool! I’d love to start an expo someday, probably when I’m older (Not sure how many people are going to take an almost 20 year old seriously lol) but I loved it when I got to go just to shop around, and my next step is to be a vendor hopefully this fall.
The show went amazingly! We had a lot of good feedback from several of our vendors and the overall atmosphere was really positive with everyone.
There were some minor hiccups but overall everything went well and I can say we did turn a small profit!
I slept like a rock as soon as I got home and am still kind of tired, but for our first show I’m really proud of what we managed to accomplish.
Yeah! Nothing wrong with being young, just means we have new ideas lol.
Only real issue with me trying to start an expo is that I’m not far from Nashville, and there’s already a TON of exotics expos in that area. Definitely wouldn’t mind doing one in a closer town though, because I do not want to drive on interstates (Or really at all, but that’s a different can of worms )
@indiflare Oh gosh yeah I totally get that, I’ve been to at least one of the shows in Nashville and driving on the interstate wasn’t fun at all
Small towns also work, as long as they have a good venue that is suitable for a show.
Meanwhile, I put up a waitlist for vendors wanting info for the next show (we’re already looking at a second location too as well as doing another show at the same location) and we already have 14-15 people!
Long story short my ex-cohost and I had a falling out over my attempt to discuss ownership of the LLC I created for the show, mainly because they expected 50/50 ownership/profits when I was doing 90% of the monetary investing and most of the more difficult tasks of managing the website, record keeping, and contacting venues.
I won’t go into any further detail than that, but our next shows will be:
Madisonville, KY - Saturday, March 30th
Huntingburg, IN - Sunday, May 12th (Mother’s Day, yay!)
Our Madisonville show went amazingly! Made a good chunk of profit this time around and had around 800-900 guests show up. A good increase from the 300 or so from the first show.
I also found out recently that the other show host I mentioned before… banned one of my Madisonville vendors from their shows just because they vended mine. Show politics yet again.
Buuut that would also explain why none of the local reptile people have signed up for my shows, they were likely threatened with the same thing.
Just means I’ll have to work a little harder to ensure my success and maybe eventually win them over — and likely focus my shows in other states rather than Indiana since the other host only does shows in Indiana/Illinois/Kentucky afaik.
I am looking at doing shows in Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.
Maybe Missouri too since I’ll be moving to Illinois soon and it won’t be terribly far from the new house.
(We’re keeping the old house too so I can turn it into a dedicated facility for my snakes! I’m excited about that!)
I am looking at venues in Tennessee right now actually — was hoping to do a show somewhere down there in June. Reached out to 2 so far and neither have been very responsive
So I’ll have to keep looking and reaching out to others as well. Maybe suck it up and actually call the places as much as I despise phone calls.
)
