Thread: Fate of Pop-Up Booth Display
Folks, For the past few years, we've been using a pop-up booth display to give PostgreSQL community booths a professional, polished look. We purchased it using about $1800 worth of community money, and it's served us well in at least 15 conference appearances, probably more. However, it's starting to wear out and I'm not sure we want to replace/repair it. One of the "feet" broke off at PyCon, its travelling case has damaged wheels and latch. Moreover, it's expensive/difficult to transport, and it's bulky/annoying to store for whomeever ends up with it. In the meantime, custom vinyl banner printing has become both better quality and cheaper. I'm thinking that it may be time to retire the pop-up display and switch to using large vinyl banners for community booths. These can be customized for the time period (like a 9.3 banner for next fall, or a Postgres+Python banner for PyCon, etc.), can be as large as a full booth wall, and are much easier to ship, transport and store. Thoughts? -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com
On 03/18/2013 06:24 PM, Josh Berkus wrote: > > Folks, > > For the past few years, we've been using a pop-up booth display to give > PostgreSQL community booths a professional, polished look. We purchased > it using about $1800 worth of community money, and it's served us well > in at least 15 conference appearances, probably more. > > However, it's starting to wear out and I'm not sure we want to > replace/repair it. One of the "feet" broke off at PyCon, its travelling > case has damaged wheels and latch. Moreover, it's expensive/difficult > to transport, and it's bulky/annoying to store for whomeever ends up > with it. > > In the meantime, custom vinyl banner printing has become both better > quality and cheaper. I'm thinking that it may be time to retire the > pop-up display and switch to using large vinyl banners for community > booths. These can be customized for the time period (like a 9.3 banner > for next fall, or a Postgres+Python banner for PyCon, etc.), can be as > large as a full booth wall, and are much easier to ship, transport and > store. > > Thoughts? > I find this... actually sad. We have toted that thing all over the United States for the last what... 4 years? The vinyl banner idea certainly is cheaper in the short run. JD -- Command Prompt, Inc. - http://www.commandprompt.com/ PostgreSQL Support, Training, Professional Services and Development High Availability, Oracle Conversion, Postgres-XC @cmdpromptinc - 509-416-6579
On Mar 18, 2013, at 6:24 PM, Josh Berkus wrote: > Thoughts? Realistically, can a vinyl banner be hung in an arbitrary environment nicely? I'm concerned we'd get to an event and discoverwe have no practical way of mounting it. -- -- Christophe Pettus xof@thebuild.com
* Christophe Pettus (xof@thebuild.com) wrote:
> On Mar 18, 2013, at 6:24 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > Thoughts?
>
> Realistically, can a vinyl banner be hung in an arbitrary environment nicely? I'm concerned we'd get to an event and
discoverwe have no practical way of mounting it.
I had assumed we'd also get a retractable banner stand. They're pretty
inexpensive and portable.
Thanks,
Stephen
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> Realistically, can a vinyl banner be hung in an arbitrary environment > nicely? I'm concerned we'd get to an event and discover we have no > practical way of mounting it. We would more frequently be ordering new banners for specific conferences, in order to handle specific booth configurations. However, a new banner is $75 to $200, as opposed to a replacement pop-up, which would be $1800. That is, we could realistically order around 12-14 different banners for the cost of replacing our pop-up. I'll point out that SCALE, LISA and PyCON all gave us 10x10 booths, and could have used the same banners. For those of you who were at PyCon, Revsys demonstrated what could be done with vinyl banners these days. They had a really cool triple booth with a full wall of "jungle" banners behind them. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com
On 03/19/2013 11:51 AM, Josh Berkus wrote: > > >> Realistically, can a vinyl banner be hung in an arbitrary environment >> nicely? I'm concerned we'd get to an event and discover we have no >> practical way of mounting it. > > We would more frequently be ordering new banners for specific > conferences, in order to handle specific booth configurations. However, > a new banner is $75 to $200, as opposed to a replacement pop-up, which > would be $1800. That is, we could realistically order around 12-14 > different banners for the cost of replacing our pop-up. Money really isn't the equation here. Let's remember how much the pop-up served us. I am not actually against a vinyl banner. I am just saying that dollars to dollars a popup makes more sense. JD -- Command Prompt, Inc. - http://www.commandprompt.com/ PostgreSQL Support, Training, Professional Services and Development High Availability, Oracle Conversion, Postgres-XC @cmdpromptinc - 509-416-6579
> Money really isn't the equation here. Let's remember how much the pop-up > served us. I am not actually against a vinyl banner. I am just saying > that dollars to dollars a popup makes more sense. Not if you include the cost of shipping it, which runs from $60 to $100 each time we do it. I'd estimate that we've spent more money shipping the thing around than we spent buying it. I'll also admit that one of the reasons I want to ditch it is that I have it right now, and don't want to store it. I really have no place in my small SF office for a 4'x2'x2' big black ugly plastic tube. Overall, I think it was a good idea to try once, and served us well for several years. However, the thing is bulky, hard to transport, and we can't use it at half the conferences we attend. I'm ready to move on to different display technology. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com