First-time Artist Alley Table at Singapore Comic Con (SGCC) 2023

[@fishenes]

Hello! Just found your channel, and really appreciate the thorough and transparent breakdown of everything. Want to add my insights and experience as well! I had a shell booth at SGCC23 1st floor (L1-AA02). As you said, rent was crazy high (we paid 1075!) We were lucky that we reserved our booth early (in april) and so we got the shell booth on the first floor, but our booth ended up facing the wall of the WIP lab (the area you didnt explore in the video). Despite that, our earnings were good! Ended up with 3.1k in sales (2789 onsite, 319 preorder), and we almost cleared out our existing stocks. However our total profit was under 1k for this event after accounting for rent, merch production costs and travel costs. In regards to the event being too close to AFA, we personally did not find it a problem since AFA tends to cater to more of the teen/students/diehard anime fans demographic, whereas in SGCC we saw a lot more families and working adults. We noticed that in SGCC, the items we sold were more """normie""" than usual (eg. normally for pokemon, gen 9 starters sell better than gen 1 cos they are fresh, but in this event the gen 1 starters and pikachu were our best selling pokemon keychains). Plus, peoples appetites for large items at SGCC was significantly more than other events we ended up doing afterwards (ACE, doujinfes), which all points to the demographic that attends SGCC to be older and have more money (but not so deep into fandom stuff) compared to AFA. I would say in that sense the crowd was more similar to Public Garden than other anime events. We do agree about the splitting of the artist alley being a problem though, especially with the main entrance to MBCC being on the 1st floor, people downstairs apparently had their sales suffer a lot (despite paying the same rent as us!) All in all though, we had a good time at SGCC23 and have already booked a booth for SGCC24 (for $1088, while gst was still 8%). While the money was not the best (we profited more at doujinfes because of the rent being way lower), our experience was good enough to warrant returning because we got to forge good connections with a lot of international artists who flew down for SGCC, our sales was still good despite being in a corner of the first floor, and having a shell booth meant we were a lot more comfortable during the weekend.

[@kuehmerlion]

Thanks fish! I remember reading about your experience on the artist telegram group, but it is very helpful of you to share more details about your last SGCC sales. Close to 3k sales on-site is very good (at least in my opinion)! Just like what you had observed, the SGCC crowd seems more of the "normie" taste or mainstream, which explains why I did so poorly in that aspect. I suspect too that because of this customer-base, it is actually more beneficial to get a shell booth. For anime-heavy or events with high influx of younger crowd, a shell booth may seem too intimidating to approach and it becomes more of a deterrence to some degree (as witnessed in AFA: CSF and Doujima) but it makes sense that the opposite is true for SGCC - where shell booth feels more "premium" and welcoming to purchase bigger sale items from because of the extra space that customers can comfortably browse around. The basic table instead, was very narrow in comparison. =( I won't be going back to SGCC personally, solely because it is a mismatch for me but I am glad it had been a good experience for you!

[@ZZtheDark]

9:32, hang on! I've seen a Spidey do this on this year's SGCC too! XD This should be a meme. 11:32, if you saw a guy with a Sonic hat from Day 1, that's me. Day 2, if you see a guy in a red jacket who looks too much like an otaku with a bad hairstyle, I was being Travis Touchdown at the time.

[@GaJelas]

Hi! I saw your video while browsing for how to prep for SGCC and i have to say thank you very much for sharing your insight! This is going to be my first time boothing there with my friends and we're from Indonesia, so there's been a lot of questions in our minds. Do you think SGCC will be welcoming for products such as comics/zine/art prints or the buyers are more catered toward "accessories" merchandise like keychains, pins and stickers?

[@kuehmerlion]

Hi! I am so sorry for the late reply as youtube didn't notify me about this. I hope this reached you in time, with the 2024 SGCC just literally around the corner. From my own experience, since SGCC is more about Western comics and toys, I would think that the visitors going there will be more interested in those, over anything else. But I have seen some booths doing reasonably well, selling t-shirts, accessories, cute trinkets - with a mix of pop culture element to them (think Labubu-inspired etc.). Even by Singapore standard, SGCC is a very expensive event to booth at, so the risks are inherently higher. Unfortunately again this year, SGCC is happening right after Anime Festival Asia (AFA) event so I would imagine that most of the anime or Japanese pop culture fans would skip SGCC, meaning that the core demographic actually appearing at SGCC is expected to be more Western fandom-leaning fans.

[@JemiDove]

My friend and i have been watching your con vlogs, they've been really insightful to us. Thank you for them! It'll be my friend's first time boothing, so he was looking around to find Singaporean vlogs of the more anime style-focused events, which is what he's into (I myself have boothed before, I'm pretty much known as that one Singaporean who does a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog charms at Doujima 2023, Little Island Furcon 2023, and GameStart 2019 haha) I recall in one of your vlogs (can't remember if it was AFA/ACE/Doujinfes), you mentioned that you didn't do so well and you felt that it was because your mistake was in hoping to sell more of your original food art, when in reality your Hololive charms sold >60%(?) of total sales. I am curious, how was your sales breakdown like between original v.s. fan art this time? I would think that your original food art might do better at an event like SGCC where the audience is either normies (parents with kids) or more western/general.

[@kuehmerlion]

Hi JemiDove, and thank you for watching my con vlogs! I focus more on anime-style conventions, so your friend is definitely at the right place with my videos haha. Will you guys be attending Doujima 2024? I will be tabling there and if so, hope to see you guys. You were right; it was in my AFA:CSF vlog when I mentioned my hololive (aka fanmerch) carried most of the weight of the sales. I didn't mention the sales breakdown of my original vs fanart for this SGCC video because embarrassingly, even though I doubled-down on making more original stuff, they still sold extremely poorly during SGCC (around 20% of my overall sales). The few times someone did purchased say, my kueh merchandise, were from my followers who personally came to find me at my booth. Quoting my friends' observation, the SGCC general crowd felt very normie compared to AFA or even Doujima (I actually did really well for Doujima 2023 but that was when I hadn't started vlogging yet). Looking back now and also reading about what some of the other SGCC creators had experienced, I suspect my display just wasn't eyecatching enough and was very easy to miss among the sea of basic booths. For SGCC case, I would recommend paying for the higher tier booths (the shell booth style), as it seems to attract the normie-onlookers more. While I was at SGCC for the whole two days, there weren't many kids roaming on the first floor, most of them (+family) were at basement level so perhaps the artist alley stationed there were able to leverage that crowd - just not where I was.

[@JemiDove]

@@kuehmerlion I see, thank you so much for the reply in detail, appreciate your transparency and thoughts! ​I am not sure if I will attend Doujima 2024, though my friend and I might aim for tabling at the 2025 one. We have also just secured a table at ACE this February 2024 (my friend's first booth experience). If you'll be there, we hope to see you too!

[@kuehmerlion]

@@JemiDove That's nice! I won't be tabling at ACE vol.2 but if I have the time, I may visit the event and if so, will drop by your table. All the best for your friend's first booth experience. Hopefully the crowd will look better at the second ACE than the first - especially if many younger visitors will be able to come by with extra cash on hand from the CNY

[@mcrksman]

I think the drop off from 2022 is also partially due to the big increase in ticket prices. I went with my friends in 2019, when it was only like $20, and again in 2022, when it was still under $30. But I can't justify $40 just to see mostly the same stuff I see at other cons, and I know most of my friends didn't go either. Unless you're a hardcore comics fan I think its hard to justify the entry cost.

[@kuehmerlion]

It is the same for me, I really cannot justify for myself paying more than $30 for a single day ticket to a convention. But it seems that this trend of ticket price increase won't be stopping anytime soon, and I can only hope it won't reach nearly as bad and expensive as western cons.