Setting up Collage...East Coast

Last Monday before everyone else arrived for Art and Soul in Hampton I helped Maria and her gang set up her on-site store. I arrived at 11a.m. and worked until about 6:30p.m. or so. Emily (Glenny's assistant for the rest of the convention), Jovencio and Diane (Maria's employees) and I unpacked boxes and arranged items into the tables. Jovencio and Diane made sure the orders were correct and priced the items then we set up the tables (and kept asking for more tables!) by similar items. We had all the inks together and all the tools together and all the glues and adhesives together and so on. It was a lot of organizing and arranging for a short few days but it makes it easier on the customer to just point to the 4th table and say "all the XXX is over there".

I had asked Maria last year about helping her "work for product". She paid me an hourly wage in cool stuff. It was my little experience in the retail world and hope to be able to do it again next year. It's one of the perks of living within 15 minutes of the venue.

The gang had already started when I arrived but you can see there are a lot of unopened boxes on the back table.

The magazines were already laid out but there were still a bunch of books to be added to these tables.

Here's Jovencio setting up the ink pads and refills.

We put items on these back tables to be priced then grouped them together by function.

Emily is unpacking one of the cash registers and credit card readers and trying to keep the packing "popcorn" from going all over the place.

Diane and Jovencio are pricing items and then I'll arrange them on a table.

Maria is checking to see if the wireless internet connection is working...or is she checking her Facebook account?

Diane, Jovencio and Emily are doing inventory and pricing some more items.

Here's what everything looked like when I left.

We got so much done that first day that all there was left to do was some more pricing, setting up signs and making sure the cash registers were working properly.

I wasn't needed on Tuesday so I returned on Wednesday for registration and to pick up the goodies I'd set aside.

I didn't get this photo of Maria and I until the last day...for some reason I forgot and wanted to make sure I got a shot of the two of us.

Here's a shot of Maria's set up crew. I was heading home on Sunday and saw the gang taking a break so we asked another attendee to take our photo.

Until my next post,

Diane