Our First Convention as Vendors
This past Friday and Saturday, Elizabeth, Jack, and I packed up a bunch of tiny glowing things and headed down to Portland for Between Two Cons, hosted by the folks from Between Two Cairns.
It was our first convention as vendors, and we had a great time!
We got to meet a lot of wonderful folks, talk about tabletop games, weird little lights, dungeon terrain, and all the delightful nonsense that goes into making tiny magical objects. We even had a couple of online customers randomly encounter us in the wild, which was a very strange and very cool feeling. One gentleman from the Bay Area stopped by and realized his son had bought him some of our medium braziers. That was a lovely moment.
There’s something really different about seeing people react to our work in person. Online, you can get favorites and orders and reviews, and those are all wonderful. But watching someone pick something up, turn it over, smile, ask how it works, or immediately start imagining it on their table — that’s a whole other thing.
We learned a lot, too. Which is probably a polite way of saying we came home with a big list of “okay, next time we should absolutely…” notes, which Elizabeth fortunately wrote down because I am awful at remembering to do that.
One of the big lessons: we need to bring back the Glowing Mushrooms.
People asked about them, and I’ve been thinking for a while that they deserved a proper revamp anyway. I have a few ideas that should bring them up to our current standards — better sculpts, better lighting, and generally more of that little “oh, that’s neat” feeling we’re always chasing.
We’re also working on a few other new and updated pieces:
Our portal sculpt is getting an update. I’m excited about this one, because portals are one of those pieces that feel like they should be dramatic at the table. They’re not just scenery — they’re a problem, a destination, a bad idea, or all three.
We’ve got a new lumber-and-stone hanging lamp post in progress, which should be a nice rustic option for villages, crossroads, camps, and anywhere else your adventurers are probably about to make questionable decisions.
And our shire-inspired Morrígan Collection lamp post will be in the shop this Friday. This one has been a lot of fun to work on, and I’m really happy with the direction that collection is taking.
The other big update is that, in the near future, you’ll be able to buy directly from our website.
I’m hard at work getting the last few bits of integration finished, and I’m very excited about what this new backend will let us do. There are a lot of possibilities there — better product organization, more flexibility, smoother updates, maybe some fun little features down the road.
So many ideas, so little time.
For now, thank you to everyone who stopped by the table, chatted with us, bought something, asked questions, or just took a moment to look at our work. It meant a lot to us.
We had a wonderful first convention, and we’re already looking forward to doing another one.
Cheers!
Josh
Micromancer-At-Large
