We Love Exhibiting at the World Tea Expo

We came, we saw, we wished we’d worn more comfortable shoes.

How exciting was it to be a first-time exhibitor at the World Tea Expo 2012? So exciting that we’re still processing it. The Scandalous head is still spinning!

Before anything else, Love and Scandal owes a huge belated public thank you to George and Kim Jage & the rest of the World Tea Expo Team who, in late March, chose our greeting card line as Best New Product (accessories category). What an honor! And how completely unanticipated–hoped for, of course, but to actually win? We were gobsmacked. Stunned and beside ourselves. So proud! The official letter was accompanied by the beautiful gold sticker you see below this paragraph. We have proceeded to plaster it all over everything the company owns!

And then the panic set in: would the graphics be ready by showtime? Were enough product brochures printed? What exactly is a pallet? And how do you pack one and then get it transported from Maryland to Nevada? What about giveaways? Everyone loves giveaways.
They’re a trade show must, aren’t they? What would we give away? (Email us. We’ll give away one to you too–as long as supplies last…which ought to be somewhere around February of 2016. Maybe we’ll write a future blog post titled Top Ten Things We Did Wrong While Preparing For Our First Trade Show. Subtitle: Learning The Hard & Expensive Way. This item placing high in the Top Five: Ordering Too Many Pinback Giveaways.) That sense of “Holy cow, what have we gotten ourselves into” began shortly after receiving the Best New Product Award and persisted until we were standing in front of our beautiful booth #715, waiting eagerly for the first Expo attendees to begin filtering in.

So if there is going to be a Top Ten of Things We Did Wrong, then there must be a Top Ten Absolutely Best Things About Being An Exhibitor At the World Tea Expo, too. In fact, that Top Ten list is much more easy and much more pleasurable to write. There is no debate about what has a firm hold on the premier position; the Number One Best Thing is Talking with All the Great People Who Make Up the Tea Industry! The unequivocal passion for the industry is so powerful. If that feeling of pleasure and well-being and that blanketed the exhibit hall floor could be harnassed, we could provide power for a couple of the smaller nations. The enthusiasm of the attendees is stimulating and contagious; we returned home with our heads full of ideas and hopes to enlarge the line, create new products and get to work on the social aspect of things relentlessly.

By the way, have you “liked” our page on Facebook yet?

But before we do all that, we have orders to pack up and get shipped. Yay!!!! Thanks so much to all our new customers. It is our most ardent wish that our cards will be a huge hit in your shops! And thanks to all the great people who stopped by to share their tea stories and remembrances with us, to those people who seemed to love looking at the faces on our cards almost as much as we love looking at them, and to everyone we didn’t have to explain ourselves to because tea is your life! You “got” us right away! It felt so good to be among our tea-drinking own!