This is it, my final post before the trade show. With only four days left to solidify a plan for Whisk's booth, we're getting a little stressed out. It seems like despite our nine weeks of planning, we're still so unprepared. We have all of our promotional materials completed. Our press releases, brochure, newsletter, backgrounder and other press kit materials have been checked countless times are ready to be printed, but that is only a small portion of our significant workload.
Additionally, we were able to collect over $100 in gift certificates to bars, which will "partner" with Whisk. Our positive response to donation requests has led us to eliminate the two gift basket idea. Instead we'll be featuring one huge prize, so one lucky voter will find him or herself with enough money to take all of Mercyhurst College out for drafts free of charge, not that we expect it. Read Whisk's press release to find out more about its pairing with Erie bars and restaurants.
We've sorted out a couple other kinks in our booth. The Wegmans gift card debacle has been settled. Wegmans increased the gift card amount to $60 and split it three ways, giving Whisk $20 to pick up gluten-free baking products. In other baking news, Mercyhurst is partnered with Parkhurst Dining Services to provide the school with healthy, organic meal options. We've spoken with Parkhurst, and the company has agreed to donate all of Whisk's icing. This means we only have to buy baking mixes and sprinkles.
Target also donated a $50 gift card to Whisk. This card will be used to purchase some of the materials needed to build our booth. We're most nervous about this portion of the project as we don't really have any specific plans in the works. We know what we want to do and buy, but we have no idea if our plan will actually come together to produce a booth that can stand alone for 5 plus hours. We're hoping to buy PVC pipe, which we can stick together in whatever format we please. Refer to the picture on the right to get some idea of how the pipe is assembled. Because our booth is in a section with a window, we'll just build two slightly angled walls coming out from the window.
Next we want to use shower curtains to create walls on the pipes. We're thinking plain black for these walls, while we'll use a more festive curtain at the window. We're going to cut it down the middle and pull each section to the side, obviously creating the illusion that we are not operating our mock business out of a shower stall. The red polka dot curtain shown to the left can be found at Target, giving us the opportunity to put our gift card to good use, while sticking to our branding identity (red, black, white and polka dot, for those of you who forgot).
Assuming the building of our structure goes according to plan, we've already reserved three tables to organize the different attributes of our booth. We want to angle two longer, rectangular tables at each end of our booth, following the shape of our makeshift walls. The table to the right will host our gluten-free taste test. Here we'll have a computer set up next to two cake pans, one gluten-free, one regular. The table to the left will feature our cupcake tower displays and all of our mini gluten-free cupcake samples. We're placing a smaller, rectangular table in front of the window to showcase our brochure, newsletter, book detailing the rest of our press materials and a computer, so visitors can review our website and social networking resources. Each table will be covered by a black tablecloth, and our cupcake displays will be seated upon lace doilies.
Provided everything goes according to plan, our booth should have enough space for people to flow from table to table. We've heard the judges are incredibly tough, so we're really hoping to win the student vote, which earns your business 10 additional points. Someone visited our Facebook page, commenting that they'd tried to visit our store location on Eighth Street but couldn't find us, so we're hoping that if people in the community thought we were real, then the judges will think we are well-planned, giving us a good grade.
Check back Tuesday night for pictures from the trade show. Learn whether Whisk was successful and see what other groups came up with.
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