CKC St Paul Review: General

[lablover]

This is the second year CK has been to St Paul. I attended a total of 6 workshops and the Vendor Faire on both Friday and Saturday. Without knowing the actual numbers, I'd say attendance could be considered low. Just my opinion...but..."Hey CK! Promotion/advertising outside your website and magazine could go a long way in getting more attention locally....at least up here in St Paul. Your vendors work really hard at these shows and the deserve better attendance."
Water under the bridge now....I sincerely hope Des Moines works out better next year.

Sorry, but I have to say this....your CK Magazine booth was a little too aggresive. Nice enough gals but I really didn't appreciate the "won't take no for answer, here's a pen, sign here" approach.
I subscribe to all of your magazines, love 'em, but I steered clear of the booth after that first encounter.

Workshops were organized and well planned. Nice variety. I prefer the education-based workshops vs. the project based workshops and there were enough to choose from this year.

The CK store had more variety and some really super deals this year!!

The gift of the Becky Higgins book for pre-registrants was really nice too...Thanks.

Vendor Faire was smaller than last year but the folks at every booth were really wonderful to talk to and do business with! Some really good deals on product if you were willing to "stock up". I only did one make 'n take but they all looked interesting. Hope to see all of you (and more) in Des Moines next year!

[KathyK]

I couldn't agree with you more. Last year, I even wrote on a comment sheet that advertising was almost nonexistant and I hoped they would improve on that for 2009. It seems they didn't heed that advice. Many of the vendors said they so wished they could come back next year because all the people were so nice, but they simply couldn't continue to lose money. That is totaly understandable and I empathize with them. I took 3 classes and loved 1, liked 1, and 1 was just so so. The instructors were all very pleasant and organized. I feel very badly that CKC won't be returning to St. Paul in 2010. As I understand from several of the vendors that the reason so many of the major vendors weren't present was because they don't attend until a show is "proven". My question is this, how can a show become proven if the vendors don't at least give it a try? Just looking at the vendor list on the website, I saw that it was very poorly attended by the vendors so maybe people just decided to skip it because the good guys weren't even there. Just a thought. I hope CKC is successful in Iowa. I wonder if having Scrapfest at MOA in Sept. has any affect on attendance at CKC. Kathy