Editing The Pen Addict 530/transcript (section)

== CY shares his experience at the San Francisco Pen Show and connecting with Dromgools. ==


'''CY:''' So first I knew I had to do the San Francisco pen show. Okay. So that was definitely something that I needed to see because we get a lot of guests, or we used to get guests in Japan, and a lot of them were from California. So I wanted to hit up the San Francisco pen show. My parents live in D.C., so doing the D.C. pen show is a no-brainer. Oh. Not a problem. They are, you know, several weeks apart.

'''CY:''' And several time zones apart. Yeah. So ostensibly, I went back to visit my family, which, you know, very conveniently, they're only about 20 minutes by car from the D.C. venue. And originally, it was only these two shows. And maybe if we have time, I'll talk a little bit about my future plans for the shows. Oh, definitely. Originally, it was just these two shows. And then I reached out to Yoseka Stationery because I love Yoseka Stationery. I think they are vision meets execution. Mm-hmm. And I said, hey, I'm going to come to the U.S. Would you like to do a collaboration? Maybe I can come to your store and do, like, a grinding event, get the customers in the store. And, you know, when customers are in the store, they're going to buy stuff. Mm-hmm. So we had several Zoom meetings, Google meets, whatever it was, video chats. And we got to know each other a little bit more. We got to share a little bit about our respective visions for Stationery, for the industry. And we logged in some dates. And originally, I was only going to do one day there. Mm-hmm. We eventually extended to two.

'''CY:''' And then I was connected to Dromgools through Kenro. And I won't say more about that.

'''CY:''' But I was connected to Dromgools through Kenro. And Dromgools said to me, they said, hey, Ariel, toasty treat, she's talked to us about you before. Would you like to come down and do a nip grinding event? I looked at my calendar. I was like, oh, well, I guess all my weekends are booked up now.

'''CY:''' And that's really how the four events came to be, really, you know, came together.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's, yeah, that's cool. So it started out as like, hey, family DC. And I really need to get to San Francisco. And you kind of filled in the gaps in between there. So let's start with DC. And can you give me an idea of what that show was like in relation to, you know, say, like, Tips in Japan, which is one of the larger stationary, you know, shows in the world? I don't know that you necessarily need to like directly compare and contrast in them. But what's like a US show experience like versus what you've experienced in Japan?

'''CY:''' So the DC show opens on Thursday. I didn't know the table assignments until Thursday. And apparently Thursday is a free day anyway. So you can set up shop wherever you like. But not a lot of people are there. And especially a lot of vendors don't show on Thursday. So I thought, you know, I'm just going to take my table and just have my stuff there. So I did. And then on Friday, Friday morning, I was informed that my table is now no longer my table.

'''CY:''' I get to get to my new table. I'm just staying quiet over here, by the way. It's fine. So I get to my new table. And it's a corner table. It's a better table. It doesn't have electricity. Okay. And, you know, on Friday night. And, you know, this is my bad. The show supposedly, ostensibly closes at 5.30. I was working until like, no, it closes at 5.00. Yeah. And I was working until like 6.00. They turned off my electricity at 5.30.

'''CY:''' In contrast, the Tokyo International Pen Show, great show. So they sent me a handbook, a guidebook to the show. You know, where do you send your stuff? How do you bring it up? The elevators. You know, where should you be? At what time? Blah, blah, blah, blah. 70 pages of guidebook. So I read this guidebook. And then they call a vendor meeting. And I said, well, it's a vendor meeting. So it must be important. So two-hour vendor meeting. I joined, turns out we're just reading the guidebook line by line.

'''CY:''' So I think a happy medium is where really we'd like to be. But so that's on the organization front. On the vendor front, a lot of individual vendors, a lot of individual stuff makers in the US, not just DC, but in San Francisco as well. In Japan, mostly retailers. So you're going to mostly see stuff that is available for sale. Very few vintage tables.

'''CY:''' Especially now with COVID and with the travel restrictions, we don't have the interesting stuff from overseas.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. Yeah.

'''CY:''' Yeah. In DC, obviously very vintage heavy. a lot of Europeans. I heard French. I heard Italian. I heard Turkish. So yeah, definitely I think more of a healthy mix in the US. But the last thing which I think is important is community. The US doesn't really have that many stores. Doesn't have that many great exclusives. The scene is not super interesting. But despite that, there's a strong communal aspect to the hobby. There's a lot of back and forth in terms of banter, discussion, people telling other people about cool things. And you really have kind of like a friend group, right? Whereas in Japan, it's really not like that. And, you know, what's that? Drumgools. And people apparently just go into drumgools on like Saturdays, stay there for six or seven hours and then just go home. You'd never have this in Japan because the stores and the customers, they haven't created this community aspect of it. And so what you have in the US is this healthy community who enjoy each other and who are not afraid to talk to each other. In Japan, it's a bit different. This pen show after dark thing doesn't really exist in Japan, especially with the COVID thing now. The Tokyo International Pen Show is divided into blocks. So you buy a ticket for your block. So you might get Friday morning and then you don't get to go in for the rest of the show because you've been assigned your block Friday morning. So you can buy extra tickets. But yeah, you get in to the block for which your ticket is assigned. And then after that, you just go home because your friends might not be there at the same time. You might say hi to a vendor that you really like, but definitely it's a lot. The decibel is lower and there's not as much of a communal aspect. People don't, customers don't necessarily want to be friends with each other. They really much rather kind of to be left alone and they just want to buy what they like.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, they're there just to hit up some of their retailers or some of their favorite retailers and take care of their business or their dealings. And then outside of their window, they're gone. That's interesting. I didn't realize that from that perspective.

'''CY:''' But I want to still commend the organizing committee because to create an event like this in Japan is, I think, not so easy. Sure. I think it's difficult to get people who want to exhibit to buy tables. A table in Tokyo at the Tokyo International Festival is very expensive, by the way. It's about $500. Oh, okay. But the facility is super modern. But the show is very young. It's only been around for about four iterations. It's going to be the fifth iteration next month. And remember, for three of these, we had no foreign vendors. So I really think when the border opens up, we have foreign vendors, foreign visitors. We need that energy here. And I think that's why it's so good for the Japanese vendors to go over to the US pen shows because they get to observe the energy that the US pen shows have. And Takayuki-san from Plotter, when he came back, he did an Instagram Live. He said, hey, maybe we should just book out a hotel and have an event for our customers. I think it would be really fun. So I think that energy is really important. So I'm looking forward to when foreign visitors can come back to Japan.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I mean, Myke and I have obviously been wanting to make that trip for years now and for obvious reasons haven't been able to. But I mean, it is like on the tip of our tongues just all the time. Like we can't wait to actually do this and get it done and just experience that. What about just for listeners of our show who may have been to DC and San Francisco, what is the scope and size just comparatively to something like TIPS as far as the scale of the show? How do they compare? Yeah.

'''CY:''' I'd say San Francisco and TIPS are probably comparable in terms of like vendor number. Maybe San Francisco is a bit more. DC was, you know, wild. It was wild. Like 350 something tables. Yeah. Yeah. What can I say? It was wild. Right, right, right, right. But I think if I'm not mistaken, in 2018, 2019, we actually had 3,000 summon attendees from across the world.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' From what I've seen of been following TIPS, and you can obviously speak on it better than I can, the growth of the show has been impressive. And from the jump, they've had the customers coming through that a lot of shows here can't necessarily like contend with, right? Like as far as just like raw gate numbers, it's a big event for stationary fans in Japan.

'''CY:''' It's a small event for stationary fans in Japan because the larger one, Bungajoshi, has like 10,000 people. Wow.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Wow. Yeah. That's, so, how do I present this question? What is, I guess, different about, say, the Japanese retailers' expectations of a pin show? Say, like you're mentioning at TIPS, so it'll be mostly like retailers, right? And there's a lot of different types of retailers in Japan. Are they mostly bringing what they would normally sell in the stores? Are they making show special stuff? Because I know you and Jacob often talk about how, you know, making trips to like, you know, buy the certain special things, say a special ink creation that's only available there. Is that a really big deal kind of across the board at a show like TIPS?