Oliver Bonas’ buyer Natalia Kosterska, National Trust buyer Bianca Mastrodemenico and Longacres’ buyer Kim Lewis are the most recent ‘dragons’ to have agreed to join other leading greeting card retail buyers in the ‘den’ for the GCA’s second ever Speed Dating with Dragons event. After last year’s massively successful GCA Speeding Dating event, which sees card publishers pitch their companies’ ranges to retailers, ‘mark 2’ looks set to be even better! When the tickets went on sale for the April 20 event on Tuesday (March 6) they sold out within 35 minutes.
Having given prior warning to its publisher members, soon as the email went out around 11am on March 4 the GCA inbox went into a frenzy, says Sharon Little, GCA ceo. “I knew it was going to be popular, but the response was off the scale! We have some great new retailers as dragons and 60 publisher members all fired up to make their pitches. It’s going to be great!”
Following the same format as the inaugural Speed-dating event last February, attendee publishers will have the opportunity to make a series of short one-to-one sessions to pitch their cards to a variety of different retail buyers.
In addition to the aforementioned, among the retailers which have confirmed their participation this year include: Sainsbury’s, Frosts Garden Centre, House of Cards, Postmark, Unit 7, Little Paperie, Calliope Gifts, Creased Cards and Moonpig, with many more in the pipeline.
Each publisher will have three ‘speed dates’ lasting ten minutes. And each retailer will see 12 publishers.
All participating publishers will also have the chance include some cards in goody bags for all the retailer Dragons.
In addition, the event will also enable attendees to sit in on two seminars – Business Strategy with Ged Mace, md of The Art File and Licensing with Kelvyn Gardner, md of LIMA UK, the licensing industry association.
