Gilded Bee at The Christmas Party Show

Being in the business of bespoke corporate gifts we are no strangers on working on briefs months in advance. With bespoke Christmas gifts as no exception.  Still, mid-May was out of season, even for us. We found ourselves at Plaister’s Hall, under the shadow of St Pauls, unloading a Christmas Tree and dozens of baubles.

This year we were delighted to be a part of the Christmas Party Show.  An annual trade event in London showcasing the best venues and suppliers (like us!) to event planners and corporate bookers.  It turns out that the biggest most important shindigs of the year are booked well in advance (ie now). The experts know that being organised and bagging that perfect venue or supplier will be the key to your event running smoothly and being one to remember (more on being memorable later).

Our contribution to this fantastic, theatrical event was two-fold.  For the evening event on Day One we held a personalised bauble making workshop.  We took our extremely popular personalised baubles and adapted the process of making them which enabled guests to make their own personalised decoration.  These were then beautifully gift-wrapped and could be taken home. What a perfect lasting reminder of the show - which of course is what we are all about!

We had hoped people would be curious and we would be fairly busy, but we hadn’t banked on the word spreading and us being inundated!  In just over 3 hours we did 110 baubles - one approximately every 2 minutes! It was fantastic to meet so many great people from a variety of organisations and event planning agencies.  The response to our workshop was overwhelming and we are now developing it as a concept to take to corporate events for team building or to add theatre and interaction.

Exhausted but still buzzing from the workshop and the great contacts we made, the next day we made our way to Day Two of the show to deliver a seminar on ’Creating Lasting Experiences in Events’.  A new crowd but nonetheless receptive. We enjoyed a 30 minute session talking about getting the most out of your events to really deliver lasting, memorable experiences. We don’t pretend to be experts in organising events but a key objective with any bespoke gift from Gilded Bee is to be memorable, and to stand out, often continuing the narrative set from an event. We were able to take the principles that we adopt when working on our client’s briefs and adapt them for the event as a whole.  Watch this space for a blog post dedicated to this...

We are not sure we have much to teach Story (the event agency that organised the show) about staging a memorable event, but we like to think we added a little bit of our Gilded Bee magic to proceedings and can't wait for next year!

Read more here about the other exhibitors that caught our eye!