After months of planning, weeks of preparation and a weekend of hard work, Oz Comic Con 2021 Melbourne is over! Preparing for this event was truly harrowing, with constant lockdowns leading to event postponement, our days were rife with stock shortage and delivery delays.
Against all odds, we finally made it!
Over the weekend, our team at Animenia put together a store at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. We arrived on Friday evening to start setting up the store, and were eventually ushered out of the venue at 9:30pm, more than an hour after the allowed set-up time, with boxes splayed out across our booth in a disorganised mess, a brand banner on precariously perched on the side wall and one trestle table fewer than we had planned for. It should come to no one's surprise that a group of stay-home anime lovers and couch potatoes would struggle to carry hundreds and hundreds of shirts, hoodies and mugs from one end of the voluminous convention centre to the other.
Nonetheless, Saturday morning arrived. As dawn broke and birds had just begun to chirp, we found ourselves there at the venue again only 10 hours after we had left the night before. We were nervous, sleep-deprived, stressed, and more than anything, excited and eager to show everyone our products.
Soon, a deluge of keen attendees poured into the convention and were slowly making their way to our store, and just as we were about to make our first sale, our eftpos machine started to malfunction. We tried to restart it, tried relogging the app, but nothing was working. Just as we were prepared to become a cash-only store in a cashless era, we pooled our intelligence together and managed to formulate a back-up plan, and placed our feet back on the road.
These brief moments of dread were replaced by a wave of catharsis as we saw the excitement of our dear customers: diligent cosplayers and shy hikikomoris, enthusiastic weeaboos and exuberant fanatics, art connoisseurs and misfits, apathetic parents and their exhilirated children- our products enraptured every possible paradigm of a person. To you all, we are truly thankful for showing interest in our products and our story, for stopping to chat with us about your favourite comic or anime, for spreading your fervour for our humble store, and for supporting us through at this juncture of our fulfilling journey.
Let's meet again at the next con!