Monday, January 31, 2011

Atlanta Snippets

As you may know I like to write down little snippets of conversation that seem to have some impact – these are a few I picked up at the recent Atlanta show:

“It’s a new world and you just need to find your place in it.”
- a well known licensing agent

“We’ve got the salespeople, the art staff and even the owner busy writing orders with customers.”
- gift company sales mgr on how busy the show is

“Dogs? – I’ve got a kennel full of them.”
- successful artist in a discussion about failed ideas or projects (dogs)

“Used to be you checked your pride at the door – now you have to check your hurt feelings there too.”
            - in the same discussion

“We’re not doing anything new unless we can convince mgmt that it will sell well – so basically we’re not doing anything new.”
- art director at a gift company

“The problem with being right all the time is that it leaves everyone else with no room to be anything but wrong.”
- in a discussion about competitor dynamics

Unfortunately (actually... fortunately) we were quite busy much of the time and I missed a number of snippet-worthy comments - because if I don’t get them down right away …poof… they are gone from memory - but the general feel of the show was quite positive. Of course every once in a while we would get someone lamenting how bad things were but, unlike the past couple years, that was the exception not the rule. We have seen the momentum continuing in these early days after the show with follow-up requests to the designs we sent and additional designs needed - a really good thing. Seems like the ball is rolling, here’s to hoping it keeps up for a while!   

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