TGS 13 Culture Japan Booth

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Wed 2013/01/30 10:29 JST in Culture Japan Booth

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.

The goodies we had available, which were snapped up much faster than I could ever imagine.

Other goodies that were available include the Mirai deck cases and posters

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!