Using trade shows for your crowfdunding project w/ Bezier Games

George: 1:09

Hi there. My name is George, and I help independent creators launch their products and games on this podcast. Those creators share their journey from an early idea to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is Kevin Padula, trade show manager at Bezier Games. raised close to$6 million across 21 crowdfunding campaigns, and today we’ll be talking about how to be successful at a trade show, accessibility in games, and killing cats. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin: 1:38

Thank you for the introduction, George. I appreciate that.

George: 1:41

So just to clarify you don’t actually kill cats, but you write.

Kevin: 1:48

Correct. That is correct.

George: 1:49

Thank you. But you have a game out right now called Colossal Cat in the Box. And this is based on Schrodinger’s cat, which is all about killing cats with a chemical substance. Please go ahead and introduce the game for us.

Kevin: 2:03

Oh, absolutely. So Cat in the Box is based on Schrodinger’s experiment, which the cat. May or may not be dead. We won’t know until we’ve opened the box. But the fun thing about this trick taking game is it’s a trick taking game where the cards have no suit. So when you play a card, you get to decide what suit they belong to. Everyone. There’s a big research board in the center that has numbers one through eight or one through nine based on how many of your players you have. And the goal of the game is to, Every turn, play a card to hopefully win that trick or your token on the number to create a cluster. Because if you hit your bid just right, then you do get a bonus for your largest cluster on your board. And you blast a four rounds. That’s how you play Cat in the box.

George: 2:48

There’s a few things very awesome about this game. Aside from it, looking anything with cats is fun. One, two, the artwork looks great. You have a large plushy as well. All of that is very fun, but there’s some serious business going on here as well, because this is actually a colossal version or a larger version of an existing game. And I read on your Kickstarter page that a lot of it, this has to do with accessibility, that Ted, the founder your company wanted his mom to play the original game, but the pieces were a little bit too small as you couldn’t quite see it. So now you guys created a. XL version of the game that is a lot easier to play for folks with different abilities. So please explain what you guys have done there.

Kevin: 3:31

Yeah, that’s exactly correct. We, Ted originally made this copy. Specifically for his mother and to play just in the privacy of their own home. But every time someone would come over they would see the giant cat in the box and be like, oh, let’s try the giant one. And so after a few times of people wanting to play it, he brought it to the office and we all instantly loved the giant one too. It’s the biggest trick taking game. I know. But it’s been really it truly does feel Necessary after you’ve played the big one, just the tactileness of those big tokens. The big first player cat is pretty fun. Just to have in front of you. It’s like a huge plastic toy. The cards every are, the numbers are 40% bigger. Everything is just bigger. It’s easier to see. We’ve had a lot of good feedback on the Kickstarter page saying, oh, I’ve got, X ailment that that doesn’t allow me to see is great. So it’s we’ve gotten some pretty good feedback and we’re glad to be able to help those people enjoy this game.

George: 4:27

Was that specifically something you marketed towards with this Kickstarter? Did you promote it as a game that is more accessible or is that just an added bonus?

Kevin: 4:38

It’s, I would say it’s a little bit of an added bonus. It, that’s its original creation idea, but.Truly I think that bigger games are just inherently more tactile, and that’s why I personally love board games is because of the tactileness of it. And in general it’s I would say it’s a little of both, but the pluses are purely for enjoyment. So that’s a big part of the campaign as well. We want to get those pluses out there. At a lot of our trade shows, we have big cat tree displays and we had these stuffed Amazon cats on there and I could not make it through a show without 30 people asking me if I could, if they could buy the plush cat. So this was really just a way to get the plush cats out there as well as get this huge, big, accessible product out there.

George: 5:27

And this game, and I’m guessing the plush cat are exclusive to Kickstarter, right? This is not gonna hit retail.

Kevin: 5:33

That is exactly correct. Yeah. We’ll have them at a few shows after the Kickstarter ends, but they won’t be in stores anywhere.

George: 5:40

Is that a deliberate strategy to make the Kickstarter do better or does that have practical reasons of fulfillments?

Kevin: 5:49

I’d say the latter. We don’t wanna deprive the world of colossal cat in the box, but to create the colossal cat in the box is quite a bit more expensive than the nice small size. So in order to just maximize profits on that, we’re gonna make it a small print run. Whatever we don’t sell through the campaign is gonna just come directly to us and we’ll sell it until we sell out. So we only have to do one print run and one and done.

George: 6:13

Amazing. That I think brings us into events because if people want to their hands on one outside the Kickstarter or see it in real life, they’re going to have to visit you guys at a trade show, which is what you do at the company. Is it correct that Spiel is the first trade show coming up where you guys will be exhibiting.

Kevin: 6:33

Oh, that is correct. So spiel is in two weeks from this recording, not to date it. But so spiel is in two weeks and we won’t have the cats aren’t quite ready for spiel yet. But that, it was the next trade show we’re doing. I’ll be flying to Germany next two Mondays from now. So we’re still getting ready for that. Packing our bags, packing some product that didn’t get shipped over We’re in full force, full gear right now.

George: 6:56

What are you doing at Spiel? What does your booth look like? What can people expect?

Kevin: 7:00

Oh yeah. So we’re in booth 2D156 We’ve got a, gosh, it’s in meters. it always throws me off. Silly American metric system. So we’ve got a pretty decent sized booth. It’s in Hall 2D156 And we’ll be selling SCRAM as well as it’s the launch of Castle’s second edition. So Castles of Mad King Ludwig was big title of ours that launched originally in 2014. It’s done very well. I think it’s ranked like 187 on B G off the top of my head. But it’s a game that’s been sold out for quite a while, and rather than printing a second print run of the original, we’ve totally revamped it. New artwork new board shape. It’s just much more streamlined now. There’s new players, swans. It’s beautiful. I’ve played both now and I can’t imagine playing the old one. But, so that’ll be the launch of Castle’s second Edition, as well as Castle’s of Man King Ludwig expansions, which we’ll have. The six existing expansions the five that have already been released, and the six one is renovations, which was also on Kickstarter for us. And so it’ll just that’s the big selling of that. We’ve got Castle, mad King Ludwig, and we have scram, and then we’ll also be demoing another game that’s not quite ready to come out yet. It was also a previous kickstart of ours. It’s called The Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig. And that’s a flip sketch variant on the Mad King Ludwig series, but it plays similarly, but it’s quite a bit different actually. These Vellum sheets and it comes with colored pencils. And you’re drawing this castle based on the cards you place in. It’s still not ready to come out yet. It’ll be releasing in just a few months, but we wanna make sure our Kickstarter backers are the first to receive it before we start selling it on On a wider scale.

George: 8:47

And so you work at a company, at a publisher that publishes multiple titles throughout the year. You do multiple Kickstarters. So how do trade shows fit into that? Do you use trade shows to tease new things? Do you use it like you just explained to show something that is already been on Kickstarter, but you show your work in progress? Like where does it fit in the overall strategy?

Kevin: 9:09

Oh, I would say all of the above. So at these trade shows, we’ll usually have these nice QR codes teasing upcoming products, or we’ll have the game and a demo copy available for testing it. It gives us some good feedback as well as you can gauge a little bit of interest in the product. Not all of our product goes to Kickstarter. For instance, SCRAM was just released at GenCon skip Kickstarter. So we save Kickstarter for those bigger titles, the titles that we think can generate more interest. Also the ones that are quite a bit more expensive to make Scrams a small little card game. But yeah, so it’s definitely for advertising, but then it’s also just to, to gauge interest as well and get some good feedback from the community.

George: 9:51

So you have all stages of development basically at your booth. You have games that are in development for feedback. You have games that have been on Kickstarter for that, haven’t been shipped yet for preview, and then you have games that you’re just selling.

Kevin: 10:05

Correct. It’s mostly I’d say by the time it hits a trade show, the games are 99% cemented in. But there’s always one or two tweaks that we can always make last minute that maybe we’ve missed in our in our play testing. So it’s always great to have community feedback in general. That’s the reason we’re selling these plush cats. Enough people ask for’em. So here they are.

George: 10:28

I definitely will be buying one. I am very happy that we’re talking today because we will be exhibiting at spiel for the very first time in, in our history.

Kevin: 10:36

Oh, fantastic.

George: 10:38

Yes. But we’re not that big yet, that we have a dedicated trade show manager like you on our team. So what do we and other maybe first time creators or exhibitors have to think about when we’re planning out a trade show?

Kevin: 10:52

So first you wanna map out your space. I’m assuming since you guys are your first time exhibitors, you’ve got a pretty small booth, which is,

George: 10:59

got a big one,

Kevin: 11:00

oh, you have a big one,

George: 11:01

but let’s, I think most folks would a small one for first time. A little bit of, overconfidence. So let’s assume we have a small one.

Kevin: 11:09

Yeah, just, regardless of the size of your booth, make sure you’ve got the manpower, the staffing to handle this booth. You don’t want to understaff yourself. Setting up takes longer than you think. Tearing down always takes a little longer than you think, but Once you’ve got the size of your booth, you map it all out. I know that we use a company called Attack that is based in Germany and they help us to preassemble these walls since we don’t have, we can’t take our nice werewolf truck to Germany. That usually carries all of our trade show equipment.so, we have a separate company we work with there that kind of gives us these pre-made walls. What we do is we give them custom graphics to print out to these walls. What we have found helps a lot is we’ll bring our licensing person or just somebody who’s able to take meetings to meet with different manufacturers, maybe different publishers, maybe different creators. And so we have about a third, maybe a fourth of our booth is dedicated to just a secret little office in the back where she can take some meetings. You’ll wanna make sure you give yourself ample spa storage space. Are you selling there? Are you mostly just interacting with community?

George: 12:18

We’re a crowdfunding agency and one of the things we’re launching this year is our own uh, platform called Fanfare which is for independent artists and creators. So we don’t sell games, but we exhibit a lot of this stuff that is either folks that have been on this podcast projects that we work with at yg and projects that are gonna be on the platform. So basically we’re just Exhibiting a ton. And then what we have for this year, and I, I wonder if you think this is a good idea. I have no idea. We bought a claw machine. You know the ones that you have at like state fairs, you know where you can win prizes and plushies.

Kevin: 12:49

Yeah.

George: 12:50

But rather than putting money into it to play you have to submit your email and subscribe to our newsletter,

Kevin: 12:57

Oh,

Track 1: 12:57

then it

Kevin: 12:58

brilliant.

George: 12:59

and then you can win prizes. And we have, we’re giving away some of our own services so you can win like a full campaign that we manage for you or some of the games that have been on the podcast. So that’s the main attraction that we have planned. But again, I have no idea how this is gonna pan out. I have no idea if enough prizes.

Kevin: 13:16

That’s exciting. That’s a big part of trade shows. You want something to stand out from the crowd. You want a big spectacle. You want something that people see and remember and go, oh, I need to make sure I go back to the YG booth. Or I can tell my friends about the YG booth. So I think you’re in a really good place with that. And then also having them play with their email also gets them on your email list so you, you know, what you’re doing.

George: 13:40

Look, we’re marketers but being in a sort of a physical space is very different. And I, what I really struggle with is thinking of the physical space and then thinking, okay, so what do we need? So you just mentioned Staffing storage space. When it comes to staffing. Say you are a creator, small time creator, done a bunch of projects, or you’re gearing up should you bring friends, family how many people do you need on a small booth? I.

Kevin: 14:06

In a small booth, if let’s say you’re in a 10 by 20 booth. 10 foot by 20 foot booth. Booth You probably only need two people to man the booth. Maybe three one person for sales and then one or two people for demos. Honestly, I’ve done it where I do both at some of the smaller shows and haven’t had any issue. Really uh, when you’re starting out paying somebody to be on your staff is a big ask.’cause when you’re first starting out, you’re just trying to get out there, trying to make some sort of profit, trying to get your name out there. But if you’ve got family and friends who are willing to volunteer, absolutely take them up on it but for the larger booths, I would just always recommend having one person per demo table. Maybe one person per two demo tables. If you don’t think it’s gonna be super busy, if it’s a smaller show, Essen Spiel happens to be the largest board game show in the world.,so one person per table seems like a safe bet there.

George: 15:04

Gotcha. What are some of the best things that you have ever seen done at trade shows?

Kevin: 15:10

Ooh. So one of my favorite things is if you’ve ever, if you’ve been to any board game convention in the past year, you might’ve seen it, but I really love the Everdell Tree where it’s a, it’s not only a huge spectacle, they’ve made it a really cute photo op. So you can walk into the tree and take a photograph. I’ve seen setups where they’ll have these log stools in a circle um, to kind of simulate a campfire setup. And then they’re mostly social deduction games, but it puts you in the forest, in the mood for it. And they have a big fake moon to like camp to make it seem like you’re at a camp out. And that’s really fun. Any time that you can feel transported to a new place. Your trade show has succeeded. I’ve seen a lot of over the top. I’ve seen people make complete separate rooms that you can walk in and they’re almost like a fun house. I’ve seen them like full of mirrors and full of characters and anything to make your booth stand out. Truly

George: 16:07

Those are great tips. Now, what should people avoid doing at a trade show?

Kevin: 16:11

Oh great question. Let’s see. You should avoid, let me ponder on this for a moment.

George: 16:18

For sure. I’ll name some things that I have seen at other trade shows that I always think aren’t great and then you don’t have to say them, you can just nod in silence.

Kevin: 16:27

Oh, fantastic.

George: 16:28

people being on their phone while they’re at their booth. I think never very inviting people talking with each other, versus with with folks that want to see what’s going on. And here’s one that I always struggle with a little bit, and I wonder how you approach this. Sometimes you get people at your booth, they’re nice people, they talk lot more, then maybe they could even talk for an hour if you gave them the time. But you also need to, speak to other folks at your booth. How do you politely end those Overly long conversations with people.

Kevin: 17:04

Oh, yes, I’ve definitely met the person, the type of person you, you’re referring to. Um, I think that you have to be friendly to everybody or you ideally. And after giving someone an answer to their first question or listening to them for the right amount of moments you just, you gauge the activity around this person. If you see a line forming, if you see an area that needs to be attended to, it’s always been like, it’s been a pleasure talking with you, but I’m so sorry. We’re just a little busy right now. I’ve gotta get over there. It feels a little rude to interrupt, but you know that It sometimes is very necessary to just you. You can’t hyper focus on one person. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta keep the line moving, so I’ve always just found looking around for another very valuable task to do. You don’t wanna sideline them for no reason. If you’re not busy and somebody’s talking to you for 30 minutes. talk to them. They could be a valuable connection, a valuable uh, investor. Someone who really loves even, even if they’re not valuable, even if they just love the game, that probably means a lot to them. But if you’re busy, do not feel bad saying, oh, I’m so sorry. Gotta go. Goodbye person.

George: 18:11

Yeah. I, sometimes I just give my card. I’m like, you know what? I think we could talk for hours more. I’d love to talk even more with you. Here’s my card. And then just, you know, that, that way uh, they’re kind of out from the booth. But thinking that you actually want to talk more. Does that sound horrible?’cause

Kevin: 18:28

No. E everybody at these conventions, they’re at these conventions’cause they love games. Everybody wants to talk to every, that’s not, maybe not true. Many people wanna talk to many people. So it’s just sometimes we don’t have time.

George: 18:43

One other thing.

Kevin: 18:44

Yes.

George: 18:44

your company has raised over$6 million across many different Kickstarters. I’m assuming you have a, you do a lot more in revenue. You just mentioned you have full truck. Normally with trade show stuff, That is great if you have the budget. But what if you are just starting out? What are some great ways to save money?

Kevin: 19:05

Some great ways to save money when you’re first starting out, going to trade shows. Of course, don’t buy your own truck. Rent a truck um, rent a u-haul. They’re very reasonably priced. And you wanna still make sure you’re bringing enough equipment to stand out. You don’t need these luxury signs, these huge printed, ornate signs. You could print your own sign, but you just need to make sure that you’re still creating a spectacle. And that you have space to transport the spectacle. But let’s see, on a budget, I know that recently for our game, SCRAM I mentioned earlier that came out it is a game about camping. And so, and it’s in the national parks. It’s based in the Smoky Mountains. So what we wanted to do is we want to recreate a. A national park sign. So I spent a week or two uh, I went to Home Depot, I talked to the guys there’cause I’m not handy. Um, and I’ve figured out how to Build this big national park sign uh, TED Laser, cut the actual lettering out. Um, but if you didn’t have a laser cutter um, then you might just use a saw or a stencil or some way to get that out there. So i, I think the best way to save money is to, to be creative. Know that you still need to go big, but you can go big on a budget.

George: 20:23

Yeah, and I guess especially in games there I would assume there’s some level of creativity in your, genes or in your organization that you can come up with something. Creative. So you’re saying it doesn’t have to be super expensive. It doesn’t have to be high-end print work on high gloss thick paper. It may also be something that you make yourself but that is just creative and eye-catching.

Kevin: 20:47

exactly. The I by far the most compliments we’ve ever gotten on anything is we bought these, this a hundred dollars cat T tree on Amazon and put Five stuffed cats in it. And people come by and they play with the cat toys and the cat tree. They pet the pet cat, they pet the toy cats. People go they just love it. And it’s simple. It was relatively inexpensive. And I, every booth or every time I go to a show, someone’s, oh, you’re the cat tree booth. So

George: 21:14

Yeah, very smart. And also I think Amazon is your friend for trade shows because you order ahead. We were at CES last year and I’m not gonna name names, but I saw a lot of Amazon packages coming to the booths because especially that are coming in from overseas you can order ahead on Amazon even if you’re in a different country and then get it delivered there.

Track 1: 21:35

And then I saw a lot of people. Repackaging those boxes at the end of the trade show and slapping returns, label, return labels on them, and sending everything back.

Kevin: 21:46

Oh, that’s a good trick. I can’t say I’ve done that, but

George: 21:49

We all cannot say we’ve done it, but we, I’m just putting it out there. I’ve seen it happen and yeah you could get away with it. And I really like the catchy as well. I think that’s another great example of being super creative with something that just is eye catching, but doesn’t cost a lot of money, is not custom built. I’ll share one more budget trick that we’ve done. So this background you see here in the back, that was from our CES booth last year. And we spent way too much money on that because it, we didn’t know we could do it cheaper. But that was fixed to the walls and I,’cause I ordered like the package from the from CES, from the exhibitor. And then I just asked them at the end of the trade show if I could. Take it with me, And they were like, yeah, sure. We’re throwing everything away at the end of the show. So I pulled just all the materials off of the walls and all the custom print stuff, folded it up and stuffed it in my suitcase, and now it’s my Zoom background. So

Kevin: 22:42

Oh, that’s, absolutely smart. That’s another good trick. You should always find ways to reuse your already existing materials. If we ever come out with another cat game after Colossal Cat in the box, you bet those cat trees will be out. Um, or maybe, maybe we’ll find a new way to use them in a non-cat themed game. But you just always gotta be creative. Use the resources you have, so that’s smart.

George: 23:04

where is that cat tree now?

Kevin: 23:06

It is in our warehouse. I’ve got, we’ve got two cat trees in there and yeah, they just live there.

George: 23:13

So wait. No one on your team has an actual cat?

Kevin: 23:16

Oh. Ted has four main coon cats. So he’s got, yes, there’s cats, but they have a cat tree we didn’t wanna, we were trying, we wanted to bring cats to the show, but we realized people have cat allergies, so we wanted to keep them kind of Pure and, and cat hair free

George: 23:33

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Um, the colossal Cat game. Um, for anyone who is still undecided as of this re when you’re listening to this, you’re probably going to only have a few more days um, to back yours, there are three fantastic rewards, and this is a great strategy because it’s so simple. There’s the colossal cat in the box, that’s the game. Then you have the colossal cat in the box, plus the plushie. Which is definitely what you should get because the plushie is amazing. And then you have the colossal cat in the box, plus the colossal plushie. So plushie but bigger. Is this the simplest reward strategy you guys have ever done?

Kevin: 24:13

Yes. We’re trying to simplify it. We didn’t want a ton of add-ons. The only add-on I believe you have is you can get more plushies or you can get the special cat in the box card sleeves because people love to sleeve their games. And uh, yeah we’ve, we’ve just decided to go very simple with this one. It’s very straightforward. There are no stretch goals. You get what this is the product that we are happy to give you guys. This is the product that we’re proud of, and I just wanted to make it easy for you guys and Tru, truly, it’s easier for us this way too.

George: 24:45

I think also there’s a lesson in there because you guys are very experienced 21 campaigns more than$6 million, and even you find some benefit in keeping things. Simple around fulfillment, is that correct?

Kevin: 24:59

correct. Yes.

George: 25:00

Yes. So if you are just starting out and you don’t have a whole team looking at the Colossal Cat in the Box campaign and seeing this very simple reward strategy, just imagine what your fulfillment will look like and how easy that will be. People just have a choice of one of three things. And that’s just what you ship to them. Was this in influenced by someone on your fulfillment team who have a headache at the end of the year?

Kevin: 25:25

Yes. Ryan is our warehouse manager and he’s the one who has to deal with all the different add-ons and he was very excited to get us down to just three options.

George: 25:34

Amazing. He’s, storing two cat trees as well, so he’s we gotta keep things simple this time around.

Kevin: 25:39

Correct. But in the past we’ve had a couple of other campaigns that have a lot of different add-ons and it gets a little confusing. It gets a little tied up. I think it slows down the process as well because you have to especially pack like for example, the blueprints of Mad King Ludwig, we had some people who got extra colored pencils, people who bought extra vellum paper, people who bought extra erasers. And so you’re hand packing all these different boxes. It overall slows down the whole production of it. If you just have three tiers, I’m, we’re gonna be able to get you your product a little quicker.

George: 26:09

Yeah, and I think another really big Ben benefit of this that people might not realize is if you make mistakes, you’re gonna have to correct those mistakes. So even if you ship someone their reward, but it has the wrong add-on, or the wrong color, or the wrong size. You’re going to have to rectify that. And shipping is expensive. So by having to resend like one part that was missing, that might be your entire margin on that one pledge. And so I think from a financial perspective, this too makes of sense to just reduce the potential error rate. You guys ship everything, manage everything yourself. You have your own warehouse.

Kevin: 26:47

We have our own warehouse. A lot of it is done in China. The packing and the distribution, but a lot of it is also done here. I believe it’s headquartered in Georgia. But we do a decent amount ourselves. It’s a nice split between the three locations

George: 27:03

you’ve been very kind to your warehouse team and everyone by keeping it I think it’s a great strategy. Maybe I’m gonna see if we can have some of those plushies in our claw machine. I’m gonna talk to you guys after the show if we can

Kevin: 27:17

Oh, we the plushies we do have, so could do that for you.

George: 27:21

So if you haven’t checked out Colossal Cat in the Box yet, check out the link in the description for this podcast. You only have a few days left depending on when this comes out. And this game will not be for sale anywhere else, not in retail, not at Spiel nowhere. you do wanna go to spiel and meet Kevin. Kevin, what’s your booth number again?

Kevin: 27:41

We are booth 2D156

George: 27:45

And that ladies and gentlemen is a professional trade show manager who knows the booth number ahead of time by heart. Our booth number will be in the description because I don’t remember ours. I’m not a professional trade show manager. And then Kevin, one more time. What’s the game that you are releasing at Spiel?

Kevin: 28:01

Oh yes, we’re releasing the castles of Mad King Ludwig’s second edition, as well as the expansions.

George: 28:07

All right. Come check it out. Come meet Kevin in person, say thank you for the great tips on how to run an efficient trade show. Kevin, thank you so much for your time and I’ll see you in Germany.

Kevin: 28:17

I will see you in Germany. Take care, George.

George: 28:19

See you.