Photos of our booth at the Thailand Game Show 2013. It was our first time in Thailand and I was looking forward to experiencing the culture, learning new ropes and meeting new comrades.
I was invited to the Thailand Game Show to give a keynote talk and thought it made sense to have a booth at the same time.
It was difficult to gauge just how many readers and viewers of Culture Japan we had in Thailand. I thought we would sell at least 50 T-shirts over the 3 day event. But even though I expected to make a loss in terms of setting up booth, shipping merchandise and hiring staff, I was prepared to invest the money spent on everything to gain a new experience and learnings - experience and learnings which would not have come about if we just decided to do nothing.
More importantly however - it was crucial to make time to meet readers and viewers. I was not prepared for what was about to happen over the next 3 days.
I was completely overwhelmed at the response and support from folks in Thailand! We sold about 610 Moekana T-shirts and all our posters, Moekana and paper bags became no more liao.
We spoke to folks who bought stuff at our booth and found that about 80% of the folks didn't know about Mirai Suenaga but they thought she was cute from the illustrations so decided to pick something up. I then discovered increased incoming traffic from Thai search engines and BBS ever since.
From this experience, I realise that the costs of the booth should be considered as marketing costs as the exposure alone is worth the effort of setting everything up.
There were also a ton of lovely Mirai-chan cosplayers who showed their support! It was great to meet all of them - more photos further down the post. This is the lovely Tina!
Would like to thank our local Thai staff and Akibatan for helping out!
Setting up - the booth looked quite empty on the first day as customs didn't want to let our merchandise go. When they finally did, they charged us 80% import tax. We still managed to make a small profit after costs of booth, staff, shipping and tax though.
Mannequins were procured locally - I feel that the merchandise looks better than just on a plain hanger.
Bags opened and stacked helps speed up transactions at the till.
Our 3D menus ^^;
As we didn't expect many people to buy our stuff, we had no crowd control measures in place and it was chaos for a lot of the time ^^;
We had a doll display for folks to leave their daughters - it was like a day care center ^^;
Our Thai DJ Pok!
By this time, many folks started to receive their Mirai Nendoroid - did you get yours yet?
Tower O Mirai paper bags - something to do with the last bags ^^;
Meanwhile just outside our booth we spotted some Mirai cosplayers! I dont have their details or names though ><
If you know who they are then lemme know!
Together with Team Thailand - the cosplay team you saw at AFA12.
The new fun way to learn Japanese - Moekana.
MiraiClock3 for your Android and iOS device.
This is Marron as Mirai-chan!
This is Ruki as Haruka-chan.
And this is Ayami Sora as kanata-chan.
More photos of Tina.
Reporting in For Channel V Thailand - the recording can be seen below.
Caption that photo.
Naoki as Mirai in Winter uniform.
We use Square as our till to keep track of orders - would be completely lost without it.
All posters sold out!
And the Thailand Game Show event photos are coming up soon!
Find out more about the Culture Japan girls >>>
