Greetings from Las Vegas, if I hadn't spent 5 hours on a plane getting here I'd swear I was still in Philadelphia. This is the first time I have ever set up a trade show where the hall has been cold during set-up!

Learned a little lesson about shipping things to a trade show floor that I feel compelled to share. 1. Always send whatever you can to the advance warehouse. 2. If you ship to the show floor get vital pieces of information like the driver number, van line number, location of where goods are delivered and the shipment number.

Often truck lines will consolidate shipments at a local depot so a driver is delivering shipments (as in our case) for 7 companies. If the driver checks in as a "multi" delivery instead of under your company name or booth number it will be very hard to find the exact location of your stuff. You'll be able to confirm it arrived at the convention center but from there... it will take some time to sleuth whose booth your boxes landed in. Trust me... you never want to end up in the no man's land of the shipper having a signature for delivery and a decorator representative who says there is no record of a delivery from that company.

So if you are missing boxes and the shipper insists they are delivered, get the fax number for the decorator and ask the trucking company (the local office) to fax the bill of lading- ask if it is a multi delivery and if it is get the list of other companies freight was delivered to. That will reduce the size of the haystack. The delivery may not show up under your company name in the computer BUT the decorator may be able to track it under the driver number. Do that right away and you will save hours of back and forth.

Now onto the event at hand...
Tonight is a press event called Digital Focus, featuring representatives of digital camera products manufacturers. I can tell you just nosing around the show floor to see what is going up I think there are some great items at this show- particularly for retailers who promote photo printing and digital scrapbooking in their stores. More on that tomorrow.

Met one person from Argentina who wants to know why scrapbooking isn't big down there. I'm betting it's because our products and magazines haven't aren't distributed there. I need to turn her on to the Scrapbook Retailer and Memory Makers websites!

I'm off to the press event.I'll fill you in on details tomorrow a.m.--Beth