The Joy of Fred Blog
Posted August 18, 2011 in Behind The Scenes, Trade Shows. Tagged with .
Oh, sure, you say. That is one beautiful booth you have there. Well, it doesn't start out that way, kids. It actually takes us three days to get the booth ship-shape and ready for our customers. It all begins with a pleasant jaunt into the city, which for us takes about three hours. Or four. Or more, depending on traffic. There was a lot of traffic. 
The Javits Center, an architectural marvel to behold. There are shelves to assemble. Signage to stick. Products to place. 
Winsor and Paula debate the finer points of product placement. Oh, the labels. Every product has a label that needs to go near it. 
You want me to stick the labels where? Once all the product is up, the signs are up, and all the blessed labels are stuck, Deb gives the booth that "showroom fresh" vacuuming that only she can do. 
And she does it with a smile, even! See how pretty things end up? We get everything "just right"... 
...then we hermetically seal it for your protection, until the next magical morning. 
You wouldn't want to mess with Liz. Nosiree, Bob! The next morning, we remove the barriers and invite our reps to peruse the booth and become acquainted with the layout and the new stuff. 
There's our rep Whitney and Deb again. Doesn't she clean up nice? And before you know it, the show opens and the booth is flooded with fine folks checking out the line. 
Hopping, just the way we like it! We hope to see you at one of our shows, where you will get a heapin' helpin' of our hospitality!
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Posted August 15, 2011 in . Tagged with .
We moved our booth on over to slot #1830 at the
New York Int'l Gift Fair and suddenly found ourselves smack dab at the head of the aisle. Great visibility + new footprint + expanding product line meant nixing the foamcore walls and Ikea shelves and developing a better booth. And boy are we happy we did. We're getting lots of fantastic feedback from buyers, browsers and our fellow exhibitors, such as:
"You grew up!"
"Holy $#!+ that's a nice booth."
"It's…so…BIG!"
"I'll take one of everything!"
"I miss you in the Judaica aisle."
If you're an attendee be sure to pay our sales team a visit. If you're an attendee paying our sales team a visit at the end of the day, bring a few cold ones with you. We're there until noon on Thursday.
Cheers!
p.s. Here are some snaps Jason took before the doors officially opened. Click to embiggen.
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Posted July 14, 2011 in Fred Hacks, Stuff We Like. Tagged with .
The cuties over at My Jello Americans really broke the mold when it comes to re-purposing our ice trays with their boozy concoctions. And believe it or not, they're ALL Jello shots. Take this, for example. It's called "the Skrik" (that's Norwegian for "the Scream" or "Ice Screams" in Fred). An artful aperitif indeed.
Here's a backward boilermaker (and straightforward genius) called The CityWide. Start with one Pabst Blue Ribbon shot glass, fill with Bourbon and pop the whole thing down the hatch. Now we don't condone this kind of drinking, but we do condone this kind of fun!
Okay guys. This one creeps me out. In fact, it's so foul mouthed it will make your jaw fall on the floor. (Just remember the five-second rule!) Take a look at the MJA School of Dentistry:
Frozen Smiles never looked so…good?
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Posted June 30, 2011 in Our Friends, Publicity. Tagged with .
Christian Northeast, the insanely talented illustrator who took our XYZ Blocks to the limit, had a super sweet feature in the January issue of Communication Arts magazine. Never heard of CA? Well, it's only thee largest international trade journal of visual communications. (I just looked that up on Wikipedia.) So getting a full six-pager in CA is like a HAH-YUUUGE deal in the design community. But you know, Christian is such a rockstar, he has been featured in CA dozens of times and probably was all "that ol' mag?…bean there, doon that, eh." (He's Canadian). Heck, he's such a rockstar he even illustrated the cover for the very same issue! Dude's on fi-yah!
Anyhow, it took a while to get our grubby paws on a PDF of the article (and then a while to take our grubby paws off the new Fall line) but we're happy to present it to you in full. Download the the PDF right here. Enjoy!
p.s. We originally were turned onto Christian through his illustrated book Prayer Requested. Add a copy to your coffee table today!
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