Hasta La Ideas

Guest post from the Liz Kinnmark and Kegan Fisher of Design Glut.

A special sort of bonding happens between Gift Fair exhibitors. People come together when they undergo extreme circumstances such as natural disasters and trade shows. Before dismantling our booth on Thursday, we were unexpectedly sad. We were going to the miss hanging out in the booth we’d built and chatting with all our newly-made friends.

Luckily one of those new friends, Karl Zahn, came by with the mallet from his Simple Series and helped us start breaking down our booth before we could get too mushy and nostalgic about it.

The New York International Gift Fair, or NYIGF, happens twice a year at the Javitz Center on 34th and 11th. The Javitz is a huge beast of a building which poses the question, “How could they make an entire building out of glass and have no windows?” From the inside there is no way to gauge the passage of time. The awful lighting flickers above you. You give the same spiel about your products over and over and over again. You drink too much coffee. You start to go a little nuts.

So how do you survive the Gift Fair?

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