2008 SEMA Recap - A pleasant surprise!

They said attendance was going to be down this year at SEMA. I was told on the first day of the show that they only had about 80,000 pre-registered, compared to 130,000 last year. We took a larger space than in the past and moved back into the central hall. Also, we were going to be doing things in the booth differently and a new presentation for this market. I was concerned as the first day of the show opened at 9:00am, wondering if anyone would come by to visit us.



Our objective at this years SEMA was to inspire visitors to think about creating. We know the market for "mural" custom paint and other typical airbrush related custom paint is soft this year. We tried to send the message that you can do so much more with airbrush other than custom painting bikes and cars. Coincidental, House of Kolor echoed this theme also as their booth featured all sorts of painted objects other than cars including; a Guitar Hero guitar, a mix-master blender, skateboards and a margarita machine!



For our display this year we had a stage fabricated and created a blank wall made of Clayboard as the backdrop. We masked the word CREATE on the wall with Ultramask. Famous Artists including Mark Remmling, Steve Driscoll, Craig Fraser, Pamela Shanteau, Mike Lavallee, Fonzy, Ron Gibbs, Brian Poppa, Yvonne Machelis, Franco, Gerald Mendez, Deb Mahan, Daniel Power, and Lynette Orzlowski all volunteered their time to contribute art to the wall. By the end of the show, SEMA had turned out to be a huge success! We were really busy for almost the entire show. We had crowds in our booth almost all day and people returned again and again throughout the show to see the progress on our CREATE wall!



A special thank you goes out to everyone who helped; the Artists who contributed their time and talent, Anest Iwata USA (our sister company in Cincinnati), Artool Products, ASET (our automotive distributor), Kevin Overturf (provided the Piracy Bike), Cliff from Karajen and of course Coast Airbrush.



What would SEMA be without the Airbrush Confidential IV (renamed to Kustom Confidential) party? This year's party was once again a huge success and a good time was had by all!. Look for pics in my next post!