The Road to the Expo- The Journey Continues

Our road to the Expo continues! To recap, we're taking a big step here at BGS this year- our first venture to the UK Games Expo 2024! We'll be bringing our unique range of gaming accessories to the show if you're a fan of Tabletop Board Games and D&D RPG Campaigns, from dice bags and dice trays to card holders, playmats, and more!

I've spent some money this week, the balance of our stall booking is paid off so we are officially booked up. The stall placements are being announced in March so I'm excited to share that when we get it! I've sort of put off thinking about this for the moment, as I'm really not sure what we need in terms of stall furniture and placement.

Luckily, we're only an hour's drive away from Airecon, so maybe a little road trip next month is needed to get some ideas on how to plan things out. Primarily I want to show off our dice trays and dice bags, but we also have things like card rails and playmats to consider, plus the gifts we offer like board game themed patches and game night table coasters, so it's going to be finding the best way to showcase the designs we have available, while making it an easy browsing experience for the customer. Food for thought atm.

We started off 2024 by receiving bulk deliveries of blank stock to turn into amazing gaming accessories (see our previous blog post), and February continued to be a busy month for us (and DPD!) as our biggest delivery yet arrived this week- 14 boxes of neoprene mats!

We were originally expecting this in March as our supplier quotes 30-45 days, and its always better to plan to the end of the window, but we woke up on Saturday morning to the surprise notification they were on the van and out for delivery, day 32 of the window! Saturday plans hastily re-arranged, and space cleared to accommodate the delivery achieved. I then added into my usual Sunday printing run the first of the playmat stock for the Expo- some themed layout playmats for Disney's Lorcana Trading Card Game.

Quick sidenote on the mats as I know others may have experienced this too. We used to buy our neoprene mat blanks (used for game playmats, dice trays etc) from the UK supplier that we still buy our white fabric from (what we print our dice bags out of), but once Brexit happened they were unable to import the raw goods from Europe so stopped selling them.

I reached out directly to some big names in the playmat world that supply other UK businesses, but unfortunately they didn't want to work with us, so I went to the supplier who prints FFGs mats and amazingly they offered to work with us. Not only did they get custom punches made for us to be able to supply blanks cut exactly to our print specs, but when we order they handle all the import duties and taxes (paperwork and costs) so I just have one invoice to pay with them and 30-45 days later the order comes via DPD to my door. Excellent service and I'm really happy with the quality of the goods.

Back to the story, turns out that wasn't to be the only morning delivery this week, as I'm currently writing this at the unholy hour of 8am as we were knocked out of bed this morning by DPD, this time with some acrylic sheets. We use food safe acrylic for our Board Game Meeple themed cake decorations, a fun addition to our Gifts for Board Gamers section after we noticed most of the theming out there was around your traditional Scrabbles and Monopolies of the world. This acrylic was a two fold delivery, as it contains some test sheets for our next Kickstarter, which we'll hopefully be fulfilling by the Expo (providing it funds of course!). I'm not going to give too much away but it's a fun one!

As you can imagine, we're starting to build up a bit of stock by now, which leads us to our current quandary, Van or not to Van- look out for the next post to see how that unfolds!

Keep on rolling!