It was uhh
Bad!
about 40 vendors. Better lighting than last year. Maybe six or seven booths with anything worth seeing. They didn't manage to fill the tiny room they were in.
I got in for free, because the vendors all got like 200 comp tickets each to give away, and I knew most of the vendors. That's good because tickets were twenty dollars, and parking was ten. (Tickets at the same venue the previous weekend for Japan fest were also twenty dollars, and parking was five. Japanfest took up 4-5x the space and had multiple live shows happening on multiple stages in multiple rooms the whole time. Only one of these shows was worth twenty dollars.)
The lighting was better than last year, room was about half the size, or perhaps even smaller than that, with less than half as many vendors and a ton of empty space. The crowd was in good spirits, as were the vendors (mostly.)
More than half the vendors were either brand new to this show, or brand new to selling toys at all. No less than ten people told me this was there first ever show!
One vendor told me "the sidewalk swap [in powdersprings] has more vendors and more customers."
Very few people traveled more than 60 miles to vend, and of those I suspect five of them were being hosted, not paying for a booth.
I don't know how much booths were this year's. Last year they were four hundred dollars, IIRC.
It felt crowded because the room was tiny, but there weren't actually very many people in attendance. The high spirits among the vendors felt like Hope rather than success, but I might be projecting.
