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.
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!
Our Thai DJ Pok!
By this time, many folks started to receive their Mirai Nendoroid - did you get yours yet?
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.
Naoki as Mirai in Winter uniform.
We use Square as our till to keep track of orders - would be completely lost without it.