An Exercise in How Not To Market Your Endeavor

[mapsedge]

How a trip to the pumpkin patch became a lesson in running a business.

http://mapsedge.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/82/

Comments

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

An excellent set of points. I'd thought of a few of them but in the fatigue-induced stupor under which I wrote the article I forgot about them. They also had a simple pyramid of hay bales for climbing, a pair of face painters, two games, and an ambulance where you could get a quick tour (but that's quickly done. There's not a whole lot of space to explore in an ambulance.)

So, yeah, stuff to do for the younger set would have been ideal - perhaps even a kids' haunted house. We did one years ago for the Kansas City Children's Museum. It was nothing more than a long cardboard tunnel with a half dozen vignettes: vaguely scary stuff, but nothing active, nothing that would jump out. It was meant to be spooky, and definitely for the younger kids.

We probably had a couple hundred kids crawl through it before it was over. We set up in a vacant storefront at a local (now totally vacant) mall, and duct taped a couple dozen refrigerator boxes to make the tunnel, which probably covered a couple hundred square feet of switchbacks and corners. We set the scenes far enough apart that you couldn't see one "window" from the last and populated them with costumed mannequins. At a buck a crawl, it was insanely popular.

Interestingly, we noted as we were tearing it down afterward, the quantity of children through the thing had actually shifted the entire structure by nearly six inches!