RENEGADE WAS AWESOME!

Since it was my very first festival/show experience EVER, I really had no idea what to expect, but the weekend went really well overall. Between school and driving (all over IL and IN), everything was very last-minute, but I managed to pull it all off with Chelsea’s help. We stayed up all night on Friday folding and tagging the new shirts, woke up at 7:30 AM, and headed off to Chicago around 8:15 AM. I must say our setup was quite awesome, with our black tent and black displays standing out among the sea of white canopies. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a ton of great photos because my camera battery died and I couldn’t seem to find the charger anywhere - bummer!

Once we were settled in with our booth, people started rolling in to Renegade around 11AM and we got tons of compliments, smiles, and laughs from the Beetnik shirts. I set up a guess how many pieces of candy in the jar game which was a huge hit, attracting hundreds of people to the Beetnik tent and bringing back the nostalgic memories of elementary school. Mid-day on Saturday, all of the sleepless nights along with a bit of dehydration finally hit me, sending me right to the floor. Yeah, that’s right.. I curled up behind the booth (which was on a street in Chicago…) and napped for about an hour or so - no joke! I felt a little better for the rest of the day, but certainly not 100%. =/

On Sunday, Chelsea and I did I bit of revamping and changed up the booth layout and displays for the day. The slight changes seemed to make a great deal of difference, bringing in many more visitors and sales compared to Saturday. We had some nice flow going on with the neighbors, creating almost a shopping mall experience where people could easily walk between our two tents. Throughout the day I walked around and saw how other t-shirt vendors had set up their booths, taking notes and coming up with ideas for new displays for future shows. I also met some awesome people over the weekend, including Jud and Marieta from Shirt Fight, the Fuzzy Ink crew, Saul from Bare Tree Apparel, Adam and Beau from IATT, Two Rabbits, and a slew of other neat people!

A huge THANK YOU goes out to everybody who stopped by the Beetnik booth over the weekend and supported us! We wouldn’t have made it without you, so thanks a bunch! =) I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend, and I hope everybody else did as well. We can’t wait to partake in more festivals and shows!

-a guy named loren