Painted Desert Fur Con Review
Howdy fellow artists! Today I will be reviewing Painted Desert Fur Con (Shortened to PDFC). As this is my first ever convention review, I will break down my analysis into 7 categories, Fun, Venue, Staff, Attendance, Affordability, Organization and Overall. Each category will use the 5 DoodleBug ranking system! For the TLDR please feel free to skip to the Overall section. Please note that this is my subjective experience and so things may be different for other people.
FUN
I attended PDFC for the first time this year as a member of the artist alley. I got to see lots of amazing costumes and everyone who stepped up to my Booth to chat with me was friendly and made interesting conversation. I also happened get very lucky with my placement and got to have a spot next to my long time aquintence now friend [IG] @Strawberrygears. We went out to dinner at the nearby outdoor mall and had a tasty Japanese dinner. The hotel also provided food down at the bar and wasn't as overpriced as you might expect! (4/5 DoodleBugs)
VENUE
The Venue, the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown is a nice hotel with friendly staff and an easy to navigate layout. I do however, have a serious critique which is related to parking. The venue has two underground floors of parking. If you book an over night stay you will be charged 12 dollars a night to keep your car in the lot. However, If you do not have a room to stay in for the event, you will be Charged 32 dollars a day. For artists and vendors these spots are not even reserved. I find this, quite frankly, unacceptable. Organizers which expect vendors and artists to work at their eventd should at the very least make sure that parking is reserved and discounted. This might be a nitpick because most events do not comp parking for vendors. However, there are cons that do pay for parking, and I think it should be normalized. At any other job parking is paid for by the company that hires people. Nevertheless, for some reason this rule does not apply to the people who work these events and I find this to be extremely exploitative. In addition, the hotel should be ashamed of itself to charge so much for parking. These prices and poor practices are part of what makes it so hard to make vending at these types of events sustainable for artists. (2/5 DoodleBugs)
STAFF
The staff at PDFC were fantastic! They were informative, kind, and always checking in with artist's and vendors to make sure everyone's experience was a pleasant one. I was even given a little bit of insider information about how artist and vendors are selected by the juried process. (4.5/5 DoodleBugs)
ATTENDANCE
Attendance on all 3 days of the convention was decent. Even on Friday, a day that is normally relatively slow compared to the other days at most conventions did surprisingly well. Out in the artist alley traffic was considerably lower than in the dealers den but this was okay because of the price differential in dealers den vs artist alley booth fees. (3.5/5 DoodleBugs)
AFFORDABILITY
What PDFC lacked in attendance it makes up for in affordability. I do not know about how good of a deal the dealers den was but artist alley was very reasonable. The inconvenience of having to tear my Booth down at the end of every day was easily overlooked as the booth fee in total was only 145 dollars. This price is almost inconceivable at any other 3 day event nowadays. Once again my only complaint on the affordability front is parking. I also stayed at my house instead of at the hotel so this cut my prices even more. In Total I made 1,234 $ and spent around 200 of this on various fees such as food, gas, and price of my booth. Please note, I would probably not travel outside of my state for this convention, at least for the artist alley. However, it's great if tour local! (4/5 Doodlebugs)
ORGANIZATION
This is an interesting one, The organization of the convention was not terrible. People knew where their booths were and staff all seemed mostly on the same page. I only have two minor critiques. One is that when I was trying for buy my badge some stuff on the site seemed a little confusing to me. I was told I needed to buy my badge for artist alley and so I paid 100$ for my own badge and what I thought was another extra badge for my Booth buddy. However, when I got to the con it was revealed that what I had actually bought was actually just the price of the normal badge which artists need to buy and a special lanyard I guess? The staff where nice enough to let me exchange the lanyard for an extra pass but on top of the badge fee was another fee which I was not aware of for the booth about an extra 45$ this was pretty irritating. It needs to be clearer to artists going forwards what the actual cost of the booth is. One more minor critique is that due to the location of the artist alley it tended to get overlooked. This can be easily fixed with better signage. (3.5/5 Doodlebugs)
OVERALL
Overall, PDFC was a laidback enjoyable con with a few minor quirks in its system. Profits were solid but probably not worth traveling out of state for. I hope I can be lucky enough to vend there next year! I rank PDFC as a solid 3.5/5 stars!