Lone Star Knife Expo and Gun Show this weekend April 13-14

[SIG_Fiend]

The gun show is going on right now. I'm here, helping Joe from JW Enterprises / Central Texas Bladeworks run his booth. There's a large gunshow here as well. If you're looking for something fun to do and want to check out some sweet blades, stop by and check us out. Lone Star Knife Expo - Home

 

[txgunshowreview]

View attachment 20378 The gun show is going on right now. I'm here, helping Joe from JW Enterprises / Central Texas Bladeworks run his booth. There's a large gunshow here as well. If you're looking for something fun to do and want to check out some sweet blades, stop by and check us out. Lone Star Knife Expo - Home View attachment 20377

It was a good show. I wish I had more $$$ budgeted in which case I would have walked away with one or two knives.

regards,

- jim armstrong

 

[SIG_Fiend]

I think the knife makers would disagree, at least all of the ones I talked to that day. In point and fact, a majority of the ones I spoke with mostly sold next to nothing, or possibly sold 1-3 blades, but that was about it. Quite frankly, there is no excuse for an event organizer to have so poorly advertised (they didn't even really advertise this knife show actively) a show. In terms of advertising costs, for the $75-100+ it costs to get a table for just 2 days at these shows, a person could get an entry level sponsorship here on TGT for 2-5 months. Gun/Knife Show = 10-20k in foot traffic (probably not much more than that). TGT Advertising = 300,000 - 750,000 unique visitors that you stand to reach if you actively participate on this forum. I think these gun / knife show organizers need to suck less at the internet and social media, or they might find themselves out of a job and overtaken by people that have a clue.

The gunshow part of it was alright. The knife show part of it was a complete joke. This should serve as a lesson to event organizers, that you don't want to put a knife show inside of a gunshow. The blade enthusiast crowd draws a different bunch. When coupled with the average gunshow goer, inevitably it leads to an endless line of people expecting cheapo $20-40 Chinese knockoff trash. Very little in the way of people that understand and can appreciate the sheer number of man hours and ingenuity that comes with designing and hand building a custom blade. I felt bad for the blade makers at this show. A lot of great people with some very artfully designed and well built knives, but the "potential customer" base was not properly targeted by the organizers.

Sorry Jim, none of this was really directed at you. I just needed to vent. I was rather upset that day, to see some of the nonsense that occurred.

Here's another funny thing. Someone from the TSRA stopped by as I was getting some pics of my friend Joe's blades (the only pics I took and planned to take were of his blades). He told me that I needed to stop immediately, and that photography was actually not allowed anywhere in the show. On some of the handouts or flyers at the show, I also saw that they said you couldn't even take pictures with your camera phone! The explanation was that "Gun owners at the show were not comfortable with having their pictures taken." That's a subject I'll be expanding on at a later date. Not long after this, I noticed that there were a few people freely taking pictures, but that had an "All Access Press Pass". Apparently these were being sold or given to a select few. Hmm, I only represent the largest Texas gun enthusiast forum, which receives 1.5 to nearly 2.0 MILLION unique visitors a year. Guess that's not enough traffic for them. Fitting that it was someone from the TSRA that said this (they work hard, but usually only on what they want to work on).

This show really just reinforced my belief that a significant percentage of the firearms and related self defense industry (but particularly the firearms industry) suffer from being completely out of date (to the tune of 10-20+ years) in terms of the use of technology, the internet, social media, and modern communication/interaction/advertising capabilities. It's like a huge percentage of this industry is living in the early to mid 90's, where the internet is still in it's infancy. It's a factor that is a significant reason we have such an uphill battle in this country towards political and social efforts. People need to learn more, suck less, and stop being freaking hermits. I'll probably be writing some articles on this at some point in the near future, as frankly, it's something that pisses me off to no end.

 

[txgunshowreview]

I hear you. Send me a PM if you would like to guest post on my blog.

FWIW, I mentioned all the knife vendors from whom I collected cards in my show review, but I agree - the knife show inside a gun show never seems to work for the knife vendors.

regards,

- jim