Suzanne Carillo

Okay, so as a business owner you like to think you have a handle on what’s going on. You try to keep up with things and stay ahead of the game. Well…you like to think that!

A little background info is necessary to understand my story. I belong to a group of independent manufacturers. We’re all little guys trying to grow bigger in the Scrapbooking industry. We work together marketing for our biggest trade show of the year, CHA winter, this year in Anaheim. We will all be teaching a mega workshop together which I’m sure will be awesome. There are 5 different companies working together, www.memoriesinuniform.com www.artdeclassified.com www.timelesstouches.net www.croppincompanion.com and us, a great deal for any retailers interested in getting hands on experience with each of our different and unique product lines. It’s called Class Magic with 5 Industry Innovators. You can sign up here www.chashow.org .

So, for this group we had been considering at one time mailing out postcards for the CHA show. Since all this planning takes place months before CHA it’s hard to keep track of what’s what and what decisions were made so far in advance.

At the same time, months in advance of the show, CHA offers some unique marketing solutions for vendors that will be exhibiting. One of these opportunities was to have your products included in a 4 page color brochure that would be sent to all buyers prior the show. If your company was selected by the jury, then you would get to be in the brochure and you would also get 500 free postcards made up for your company. I’m not sure how many companies were going to be picked, but since there are so many that exhibit at the show I figured our chances were 1 in 5,000 that we would be picked, but I still filled out the forms and sent in 3 images of our upcoming product lines.

Flash back to this morning when I get a call from UPS asking about clearing a package at the border from Michigan with postcards for CHA. Immediately I’m thinking that these are the postcards we had done for my group and that I was now having to pay $40 on UPS customs clearance and taxes for something that didn’t even cost that much (the value of the package was $27). I write an email off to Amy one of the ladies in the group who is like our head honcho and ask what I should do with these postcards since I was having to pay all these other fees. She writes me back and says,

"What postcards? Are we doing postcards?"

Now if Amy doesn’t know it…then you’re pretty much guaranteed no one does. So then I’m really confused. Who the heck is sending me postcards for CHA? From a printer in Michigan? What is going on?

After about 5 minutes of racking my brain I thought…hmmmm…didn’t I try to get into some preshow ad thingy a while back? So then I pull out the CHA handbook and start reading. Sure enough, to my utter amazement PDQ was chosen to be included in this 4 page brochure! The irony is that you do all sorts of things all the time hoping to promote your company but literally maybe .001% of the time you hear something back. So this is a really big positive boost and now I can’t wait to see what image they chose to use in the brochure. I’m including the 3 that I had sent in here for you to view. These three lines are titled Resort, Sync, and Fete. We will have 6 new lines with coordinating chipboard letters and shapes.

You’ll be able to see more about the new lines and hopefully the full project that I am developing for the mega workshop soon. We are working with even more small manufacturers that are providing some awesome ribbons and paper fasteners as well as new paper flowers. They will be coming from www.creativeimpressions.com , Glue Dots and www.scissor-sisters.com .

Also, I will of course now be sending out our 500 postcards to stores to invite them to see our new products. Thank you CHA! I can’t wait for the day when I can have a personal assistant to help me remember all the stuff that I’ve done.

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