Will you be retailing the Arri 300W Junior Fresnel as one of your sub product lines as I’m quite interested in one. Not sure how big your stand is going to be this year but maybe you could do some demo’s of it and maybe the Broncolor’s too?

Regards

Darren.

Thanks for your ideas re Focus. We have a need to promote our workshops at Focus and we will be doing that at one of our five zones. I find that potential workshop delegates often want specific information about the Studio Lighting event at our studio or the Speedlight Mastery event in Amsterdam etc and that only one of our team can deliver the information required. We have Personal endorsement is a vital part of converting a prospect into becoming a paying customer and to some extent that is what this blog achieves through feedback from delegates.

Focus is unlike SWPP and will interesting for us as we are retailing four major brands: Pocket Wizard, Lovegrove leather portfolios, Broncolor Mobil and our DVDs. We will also have a series of sub product lines, The Love Cube (info to follow), the Lovegrove Flash Bracket, and the Lovegrove lighting gel collections to name a few.

We are in the fortunate position at the moment where the demand for our workshops tends to be greater than our diary availability and they sell out as fast as we can put them on. So our effort at Focus is going to be principally on product awareness and retail sales.

Marko and I will be on hand to personally advise on workshops and post production as required. I expect you will be seeing a few Lovegrove delegates from our Evolve programme and probably a few of my consultancy customers too on our stand from time to time.

Kindest regards, Damien.

In respect of advertising your workshops at Focus. An idea I have is that you could have one or more past participants on the stand to give a personal perspective of their experience on a workshop.

As the show is on for a number of days you could spread this out so that particpants could maybe spend just half a day each, thereby allowing them time to do other things at Focus.

Apart from relating their experiences to prospective attendees, particpants could go on to say how they have used the learning in their photography – the buisness benefit / personal development or both.

Perhaps you could ‘reward’ the participant by giving them a voucher towards a course or DVD.

Just a thought
Dave

The trouble with demos is that no personal contact is made and the crowds and congestion on the stand stop any trade.

Customers wishing to buy a portfolio, Pocket Wizards, DVDs or to talk about a workshop for instance can’t because of the noise and lack of access.

So to combat this, next year we will have a custom made stand with four zones staffed by a dedicated and knowledgeable team.

I will be there on hand with the aim of spending time with you all and being able to answer any questions you may have on a 1:1 basis.

Damien.

How do you stop the pushy togs, which treat the event like a training session for the front row of scrum being at the front? Perhaps you could allow selected togs (who’ve registered on your site, hence been here and know what you are about) to take part!!! Or maybe run a comp on here to find your lucky togs!

Do I get one of the allocated slots pls??? I promise not to use my elbows …

I’m not planning on doing any seminars at Focus but our trade stand will be bigger to reflect our diversification and the needs of our customers.

The past 2 years I’ve been asked to talk in the Canon theater at Focus. I’d love to be asked again, so we’ll need to wait and see what happens.

Luke, has started to put together an online calender for the workshops and events that we run. The Creative TTL days were intended for early adopters of the PW system. We added another event in March for the last few voucher holders who wanted to join me on a creative day.

I’ve developed a Speedlight Mastery day to take over from the old Urban Portraits workshop and the transitional Creative TTL event. It is designed for 4 delegates using the same brand of camera.

I have no plans to add more creative TTL days at the moment. I may add a couple of Nikon events but it will be on a demand led basis.

Cheers, Damien.