Power tools charged and primed, dungarees cleaned and pressed, blueprints rolled out on the drawing board.. with just a few days until this years Outdoors Show it goes a little crazy at Alpkit. Of course we will have forgotten all the things we vowed never to do again from last years show. We will end up over stretching ourselves, we will leave things to the last minute, we will drink too much Friday night and we will inevitably bug each other with our idiosyncratic ways.
Let’s not pull any punches, it is going to be tough this year, cash is short and square metres come at a premium. We are pulling together and we will be putting on a good show.
So we do the big show but it would be foolish not to question why we do it. Sometimes there is no easy answer it is all just part of the game. Maybe we are scrappers at heart, trying to punch above our weight. The build up is always the hard work and each year we make grand plans, a new self build better than the last one. We think that our work will pay dividends, our stand will look great.
Will we make any money? nah not very likely. When you do the math and work out the rate customers need to checkout per minute you get a silly figure, and then you have to have enough stock on the stand to last a day at that rate, and then you need to have the floor space to accommodate that number of people which means your stand becomes bigger and even more expensive.. the best we can hope for is to break even.
We will be knackered by the end of it but we will have met hundreds of people we have previously known only by their email addresses. It is fun to bring our gear together once in a while and wrap it up in a little Alp Shop, we really should do it more often, however we still get a bigger buzz when we see it unleashed and out in the wild!
Check out what is going on at the Outdoors Show this year.