If this is your virgin NSS Show like us, you’ll feel a tremendous granite boulder lifted from your weary shoulders when you’ve finally finished packing up and shipping off the materials for your trade booth. You might also, after your initial elation, feel an enormous Tsunami of trepidation.
After all the research and competitive pricing you’ve done to choose your shipping provider, the civil engineering feat of fitting it economically into the costly temporary home you purchased for it’s trip (it’s kind of like a 5000 piece monotone puzzle), the physical exertion of packing (and likely re-packing a few times or more), the strain on your neurons of what to do about the odd large bulky-sized items that there seems no packaging available to man for, the measuring, the weighing, the shipping paperwork and labeling, the emotional loss you felt when you handed it all over and said “farewell” (which you meant literally),…after all that… these ominous looming questions may remain:
Will we ever see our precious creative fragile unique pieces in the Big Apple? Will they arrive on time? Will the pricey transportation “experts” realize the value (not to mention the emotional value) of their cargo and treat it tenderly? Will it survive the journey even though we packed our cartons with sixteen miles (we measured that, too) of reinforced packing tape apiece? Did we get the street number right or invert our booth number when we labeled?
Most importantly, what the heck did we forget that we have to somehow now cram into our baggage-fee suitcases?
When all is said and done and we have secretly blessed the items and sent them good energy for a successful journey, it seems the leap-of-faith (or insane) thing to do is assume that all will go well and expect to be re-united with your Babies (or Puppies, in our case) at Jacob Javitz the week of the show. At which point, you will have survived your frantic last-minute preparations, your flight from wherever you are that makes driving to the City (much less, driving in the City) just plain crazy, and a New York City cab ride. At that point, setting up the booth should be a piece of cake.
Stay tuned to see if our glass-half-full outlook is realized.
Good luck fellow exhibitors and if my Carton No.3 doesn’t make it (the words - corrugated cardboard smithereens – come to mind) can we please borrow someone’s scissors?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: National Stationery Show Shipping Jitters
