Travels & Trade Shows

Written by
Alissa
World Champion LumberJill
​Founder & Owner of the Axe Women Loggers of Maine

​Over the years tons of people have asked me how we go about booking our shows throughout the year and filling up the AxeWomen show schedule... "Do people just call out of the blue and hire you?" ... "Do festivals email you and ask you to come?" ... "How do people find you? Do they Google you?"
The answer to all these questions is... yes! We get phone calls, emails and "contact-us" submissions through our website. 
But we also get to travel to super fun trade shows throughout the year where we book a lot of shows. If you are not too familiar with our type of industry... the best way to describe these trade shows is… 

...a convention of clowns, magicians, acrobats, jugglers and ... well... AxeWomen!! Sounds fun, doesn't it!!? The IAFE (the International Association of Fairs & Expositions) hosts several of these trade shows and conventions around the country each year. Fair managers, festival organizers and others looking to book entertainment, or hire security for their event, or learn about the latest safety and health protocols attend these events. Entertainers, like us, will have trade show booths set up with videos, brochures, and sometimes small demos of what they offer.... Believe it or not, we are one of the few trade show booths with axe throwing targets, chainsaws and chopping logs!!!
The very first one of these conventions I ever went to was in Las Vegas, about 10 years ago. I had no idea what to expect... I just knew that everyone said I had to go! I figured "go big or go home"... So I paid for two side-by-side booths, invited Kat to meet me there, and loaded up the truck with chopping stands, logs, axes, cross-cut saws, chainsaws... a few Christmas trees... and left Maine for a crazy adventure out to Las Vegas one November morning!
Scheduling worked out perfectly that I would be driving through Colorado on Thanksgiving Day on my way across the country! My best high school friend was living there at the time. So, I stopped, enjoyed a delicious meal with her family and then convinced her to join me on the rest of the road trip to Vegas!! We crammed a lot into those few days! We hiked in western Colorado and Utah, went sightseeing through the desert and spent a day and a night in a ghost town in Nevada... actually sleeping in a renovated miner’s cabin!!
We left the ghost town early the next morning, drove through the desert and mountains during sunrise and made it to the Las Vegas airport just in time for her to catch her flight back to Colorado and for me to pick up Kat and head to the convention center... which was located on the Vegas Strip! 
Kat and I set up our booth, checked into our hotel (overlooking the Strip) and did a little exploring before the convention opened the following morning.
There were roughly 300 booth spaces filled with any type of entertainment you could imagine! There were monster trucks, monkeys, frisbee dogs and racing lawn mowers throughout the convention center! Just in our aisle alone we had a John Wayne impersonator, a martial arts speed painter, a juggling family, and a sword swallower! You could spend days walking up and down aisles looking at everything.... But we were there to work! We set up our chopping logs and did just that! We took turns chopping logs, sawing logs, chatting with people about what we do and... signing lots & lots of contracts over the next few days!!! We signed up music festivals in Canada, state fairs in California & Georgia, a rodeo in Wyoming and dozens of things in between!!! It was a huge success!!! 
​We continue to go to these conventions and trade shows a few times throughout each year. Sometimes in Texas... sometimes in Pennsylvania... They really are a good way to fill our schedule - but more than that they are a great way to reconnect with old friends we've made over the years and to meet new friends! Because, really, can you ever have enough tightrope walkers, dock dogs or stunt drivers as friends???