Pelikan Hub x 2

What a weekend! Many thanks to the people who joined me for the first Pelikan Hub in Seaside!

Many of you may already know what an unusual year it was for Pelikan Hub planning, for those that don't here is a quick recap and background. (Pelikan was purchased by Hamelin group in 2023 and I am speculating that whoever ran the Hubs on their ends previously no longer works for Pelikan) Pelikan announces the date for the Pelikan Hub in Early July. I sign up and request a Hub location in Seaside Oregon. By mid August we still have had no communication from Pelikan about the September 25th event, this is slightly concerning. End of August I get a confirmation that they have added Seaside Oregon to the Hub locations. Yea!! Now is when the chaos starts...I find out Pelikan has had my name and Seaside Oregon on a map dot in Seaside California. I attempt to get them to correct that. They finally correct it the week of the hub. In the mean time some folks from the Monterey Bay area have signed up because there is a map dot showing the Hub in their neck of the woods. I receive my attendee list and contact the people in California. This same week people start receiving emails uninviting them from the Hubs! How do I know this? I got one...so I am uninvited to my Hub. Oy!! Pelikan acknowledges that these emails uninviting people were perhaps not well done...by this point most Hub Masters have publicly invited people to attend even if they are not registered. This makes it harder to plan since you don't have an idea of your attendee numbers. Then the next week Pelikan releases all of the Hub Masters contact information to everyone. So thats fun. The next bump...the swag that was shipped from Hamelin in France gets stuck in customs and then we have to pay Brokerage fees on the shipments. I likely paid more in brokerage fees than the value of the swag they sent. Frustrating, but ok. There was not a step of the way that Pelikan did not make this more difficult than it needed to be. I am hoping that this is not the end of the Pelikan Hubs and I am also hoping that maybe in the future they will just choose a date and help with the sign up and location coordination and leave the rest to the volunteer Hub Masters. To me the swag is irrelevant to the event. ( Granted, to some people the swag is the point of the event so there are wildly differing opinions here)

Sooo, that gets us to this weekend. Initially I had expected a group of 12 who were to attend our Seaside hub. I was concerned because seating 12 in my little shop would have been very tight(maybe impossible!). I sent out a reminder early in the week asking for attendance info so I could make sure we were prepared. Half of my participants could no longer attend so we had no problem with the space.  We kept it very informal and socialized with one another and at the end of the night I had a drawing for a few items I had donated so we could have some prizes. Everyone walked away with something which was great. The "grand" prize was a Pelikan Pyrite pen and ink set and the winner of that is one of my customers that only likes black pens. Hilarious if you know that the Pyrite pen is bright yellow! (he ended up giving that to his wife, he just couldn't get over it not being black. I love it!) If we have the opportunity to do it again next year I have made some notes on activities I think we could do to make it more interactive. The best part for me was the connections made in our small group. 

The PDX Hub was planned for Saturday as they could not get a venue for 200+ people on Friday night and they very kindly invited me to set up a sales table at the event. So after putting the shop back together Saturday morning I packed up, left Kurt in charge of the shop and drove to the Portland metro area for their hub. ( it's about 1.5 hours away) I kept the inventory simple and offered some really great pricing on Pelikan items, which was popular so I would do that again. My cousin and her wife met me there to help out which was great fun for me. I am planning to slowly train them into being pen people!

I love the PDX event, it's always so well planned and executed. The volunteers are amazing and the attendees are great fun. The PDX Pen community is large and friendly. It was great to see some people that I may only see at the Pelikan event or the PNW Pen show(because lets be honest, I don't leave the coast unless I have to...). There were about six vendors set up. There were also tables with paper samples and the No Kill Ink Shelter for folks to rescue from. They have a raffle for prizes that were donated by vendors or attendees which looked like was very successful. The time passed too quickly and then I packed up and drove back home. What a great night!!

Despite all of the pre event fumbles the pen community once again turned out in beautiful colors for both events!