Monthly Archives: March 2022

In many ways, and I speak from experience, being a vendor at an Oddities & Curiosities Expo is like being a barista in a shopping mall Starbucks on the first shopping day of the holiday season. Namely, the crowds come pouring in right after the doors open, and you only realize that the doors are closed when the crowd lets up and you get a chance to check the time. In small retail, this isn’t a bad thing, and my only regret was not being able to get a quick shot of what little was left at the booth after the Expo closed. Suffice to say, for this coming Austin Oddities & Curiosities Expo in June, the selection will be greater because of the number of plants out of winter dormancy, AND there should be room in the truck for a few surprises that nobody is going to expect. And after that, it’s only a short six weeks until Aquashella Dallas.

As always, there are a lot of people to thank for this year’s Dallas Expo running as smoothly as it did, starting with the Oddities & Curiosities Expo staff and crew. Three years after the first one rolled into town, and they still act as the gold standard for convention and exposition operation: when I compare them in professionalism and sheer hard work with the Texas Frightmare Weekend crew, this is an incredibly high compliment that I don’t give our quickly or easily, but they earn it every time. Here’s to their organization and curatorial skills (I may not have been able to leave the booth, but I saw a lot of other vendors’ works going by, and the Expo crew works incredibly hard to keep a wide and surprising variety of goods in each show), here’s to the fellow vendors who made setup and teardown as easy and friendly as it should always be, and here’s to everyone who came out to look around and left with plants. You’re the reason I do this multiple times a year.

Fin.

For those lamenting having to miss out on the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo this year (to be fair, there was a lot of interesting things happening in Dallas this last weekend, and the beginning of spring is when we all start budgeting our weekend time because we know the heat will be upon us soon enough), take solace in two bits of knowledge. Firstly, the Oddities & Curiosities Expos are traveling shows, spread all over the United States, so odds are fairly good that they’ll show up to a major city near you eventually. For instance, your humble chronicler makes the first of two trips to Austin in 2022 on June 18, where the Triffid Ranch returns for its third appearance at the Expo at Palmer Event Center in downtown Austin. The fervent hope is to spend at least a couple of shows in 2023 outside of Texas entirely, and the Expo crew is one that is worth joining in that endeavor. Details will follow as they come along.

To be continued…

If there was any downside to this first Oddities & Curiosities Expo, it was that just like everyone else, an increase in prices was inevitable this year. The last time fuel prices went this high, back when the Triffid Ranch was a tiny operation, fuel costs for shipping was enough to move so many businesses to using plastic instead of glass for storage (take a look at a typical grocery store and note that about the only things in the condiments section in glass are ones incorporating lots of vinegar if you don’t believe me). For a lot of reasons, this really isn’t an option as far as the plants are concerned (he said, once again rueful about the effects of Texas sun on most plastics), so everything had to jump in price a bit.

The upside was having a conglomerate of customers who not only understood, but still commented on how low prices were. Well, I’m trying my utmost: as I’m constantly trying to explain to MBAs who want to argue about the viability of a carnivorous plant gallery (most of whom have problems spelling “MBA” without at least a spotter and a coach), making a profit is important, but it’s not the only reason for doing this. Yeah, the look on kids’ faces when they see a carnivorous plant up close for the first time isn’t something that pays the rent, but if profit was the sole criterion for doing this, I’d start a hedge fund.

To be continued…

For all of the praise you’ll see coming from this direction about the Oddities & Curiosities Expos, one thing I can’t recommend is any particular vendor to recommend. It’s not that I can’t think of any, or that each Expo hall isn’t packed solid with intriguing and fascinating vendors carrying items of all sorts. The problem is that I’m lucky to be able to get out of the Triffid Ranch booth space the whole day long, so seeing anybody else except in passing just isn’t an option. Apologies to my cohorts and colleagues in this: all I can tell everybody else is “go buy lots of great stuff from everybody else, too.”

Now that things are going back to something approximating “normal” (although I wonder who decided the baseline), it’s quite nice to get back to taking the Triffid Ranch on the road. The Oddities & Curiosities Expo remains one of the best shows of its type for road trips: it runs in multiple cities through the year, each Expo has a good mix of local vendors and vendors who follow most if not all of the annual tour, and each Expo runs in a locale with excellent parking and an easy-to-access venue. In a way, it also doesn’t hurt that each Expo is only a one-day affair: with both Dallas and Austin shows, we vendors are nearly stripped clean by the close of business, and a second day might just kill us all. At the same time, the number of interesting people, both newcomers and old friends, at each show makes it that much harder to break down and go home on Saturday, because there’s a part that wishes that greeting everyone on a Sunday was an option.

To be continued…