|
1-10 of 22 messages
|
Page 1 of 3
Next
|
|
Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industry?
|
Reply
|
|
by MBRE on April 4, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
|
Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industry? I was a vendor at 13-15 Repticon shows a year. This year I decided to try something different and start my own show. I received an email from Billy of Repticon stating because I am going on with this show, they have banded me from vending at their show and the ONLY reason they are putting on their Charleston show is to be in competition with mine. (I have the email to prove it) I feel the only people they are hurting are vendors. This is a very petty move on Repticon's part I believe. Well they have now become very desperate and threatened by my show, that they are calling all of my vendors on my Vendor List bad mouthing me and now I have heard they are offering my vendors free tables at their show if they cancel mine. Really? Why can't they just go on with their other 60 shows a year and let me do mine? This is getting out of hand and I thought you all should know Repticon's true colors. I am very honored that the vendors on my list are on my list. Maybe if they come to my show, they can see how you should really treat their vendors. www.myrtlebeachreptileexpo.com
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by theemojohnm on April 4, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
Hmm.. Interesting.. I have heard (in the past) good things about Repticon shows, but I, amazingly enough, have never attended one. So, I have no first-hand opinions.
I am not surprised by this, as I have recently (last year, perhaps?) been made aware of Repticon's "true colors"..
One of our very own SHHS Team, brought up a possible mold problem, after many, many attendee's and vendors got very sick, following one of their shows. There was, from what I understand, visible water-damage, and mold on several ceiling tiles, of the Shriner building, of the Columbia, SC show.
This individual was simply looking out for the well-being of the show attendants, and vendors. But, because he was "hurting the Shriner's business", he was banned from the show.. They appear to be extremely money-hungry folks, and don't seem to care about much else, including public health.
Though, again, I have no first-hand experience dealing with Repticon, or attending their shows..
I will let this individual elaborate more, if he so chooses..
Take Care,
-John Mendrola
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by Buzztail1 on April 4, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
I can understand that you are upset and I have no wish to be in the middle of this one.
However, as I expect this one to get heated and people will take sides and call names, etc, I am telling you up front that if you don't fill in your profile with true and accurate data and stand up for what you believe in, then I will remove this thread as inflammatory and obviously not something you are interested in pursuing.
24 hours and I will recheck.
I personally have no problem with competing shows.
R/
Karl
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by theemojohnm on April 4, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
Good point, Karl. I can see this thread possibly beccoming combative. For the record, as stated in my original post, I have never interacted with Repticon, nor have I personally attended a Repticon show. So, I don't have much of an opinion, one way or another. Although, after what I have heard (second-hand, of course) from the incident I cited above, I am not surprised by this. Though, again, I have limited experience to make any claim, for or against, Repticon.
And yes, please fill in your profile. I missed that one.
Take Care,
-J. Mendrola
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by Cro on April 5, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
LOL, guess the repti-"cons" are afraid of some friendly competition.
Jay has an opportunity here in producing the first Myrtle Beach Reptile Expo, to show folks what a Quality reptile show can be.
The show is in a great, modern location, not some run-down venue in the bad part of a town.
And, Jay is signing up vendors who are known for quality, and not allowing the trailer trash / hillbilly vendors who raid den-sites and fill their tables with freshly wild caught animals.
You can see a list of the Quality Vendors who have signed up so far at this link:
http://www.myrtlebeachreptileexpo.com/htm/vendor-list.htm
And, you can find out more about the Myrtle Beach Reptile Expo at this link:
http://www.myrtlebeachreptileexpo.com/index.htm
Would be a great show to plan a family vacation around, as Myrtle Beach offers many things that would be fun for an entire family, in addition to the reptile show.
I am wishing Jay the best of luck in this venture.
When folks see what a quality reptile show is supposed to look like, it would not surprise me if more and more people and vendors abandon the repti-"cons."
Best Regards
John Z
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by Peter84Jenkins on April 5, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
"And, Jay is signing up vendors who are known for quality, and not allowing the trailer trash / hillbilly vendors who raid den-sites and fill their tables with freshly wild caught animals."
It is for this reason I will not attend the repticons.
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by CrotalusAdamanteus on April 5, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
|
I've been to quite a few Repticon shows and I must say, I wasn't impressed. I mean, a 20g with 50 freshly caught Copperheads? Not my idea of a show. Definately foe.
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by Repticon on April 5, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
I wanted to address the situation from Repticon’s perspective.
Our team has been working on a show in Myrtle Beach, SC for over a year and a half. We signed a contract with the Myrtle Beach Convention Center LAST YEAR for a show that will be held on September 24-25 of this year. We announced our Myrtle Beach show at our Charlotte, NC show on January 8th of this year. Weeks later, we began hearing rumors from our vendors that Jay Eaton was trying to pull together a show in Myrtle Beach ahead of our already announced show. Instead of dealing with the rumor mill, I attempted to contact Jay directly, since he has done business with us in the past.
When I spoke to Jay, he said that he had been working on a show before he found out about our show, and that he felt terrible about it. His exact words were that his “heart sank” when he heard that we had announced a Myrtle Beach show because he did not want to compete with us in a market that we were developing. He said that he had already signed a contract with his venue, a hotel on the beach, had paid a deposit, and that he couldn’t get his money back unless he found a flaw with the venue during his site inspection. At this point, according to Jay, he had never set foot in Myrtle Beach, and had never seen the hotel venue that he booked.
During our conversation I explained to Jay that if he was positioning himself as a competitor to our shows, we would have some concerns about him vending at our Carolina shows. Our concerns stem from the fact that we have literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing our shows throughout Georgia and the Carolinas over the past several years to build traffic at our shows, and it would not make much sense for us to put someone actively competing with us in front of that audience for the price of a $250 table fee, allowing him to market directly to his target audience at a fraction of the cost that we have paid over the years. That’s just not good business for us.
Jay explained to me that his show was not designed to compete with ours. As he described it, it was going to be a smaller, non-venomous-included 60 table show, and that he only planned to run it once a year. I asked him if he’d be willing to put that in writing, and he said absolutely. He also said that he would “give me his word” that if he vended at our Carolina shows he would not use our shows as a platform to promote his own competitive show, and that I should trust him after doing business with him for years.
I took Jay’s words at face value when he said that he was not trying to compete with us, that he had been working on his ideas without knowing what we had been planning, and that he was “trapped” by a contract with his hotel venue that he might not be able to get out of. At that point, I told him that we’d have no problem with him vending at our Florida shows (the state that he lives in), and that given the situation and the differences that he was explaining about his show and ours, we might be able to support his show in Myrtle Beach, allowing him to vend in the Carolinas, pass out flyers, etc., but that I’d need to think about that a little more.
I also told him that if he could move his dates (which he had not yet announced anywhere) to after the show that we had already announced, or to a location that was not as directly competitive with the show that we had already announced, we would absolutely support his show, and give him whatever help we could. We left this phone conversation in a very positive way. I told Jay that I’d talk to the rest of our team to get their thoughts, and asked him to keep me in the loop about how his plans developed. He agreed and said “I give you my word that you’ll be the third person alive to know what’s happening. I’ll know, my wife will know, then I’ll call you.”
When I left that conversation, I trusted Jay to keep his word, and I felt optimistic that we could work through things in a way that worked for both parties. I was quite surprised a few weeks later when, having had no more communication from Jay, we received a call from a friend of his who used to share tables with him at our shows asking if he could still vend with us. He said that Jay had told him he was promoting a “huge show” in the same venue that we had already booked, the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, and that Jay had been “banned” from our shows. I was still waiting for a call from Jay about how his site inspection went at his hotel venue, and was astonished to hear from a third party that we had “banned” Jay, which was completely untrue.
I immediately tried to call and e-mail Jay, and did not hear back from him for a few days. When I did speak with him, I asked him directly what was happening with his show, and why he had not kept his word to me about keeping me in the loop so that we could try to find a way to keep things positive. His response was “I guess I did say I’d do that, didn’t I.” That was it. He confirmed that he was moving his show from the venue that he claimed he couldn’t move out of in our earlier conversation, and that he had contacted and booked the same venue that we had already booked months earlier, for a show that was less that two months ahead of the event that we had already announced and advertised in Reptiles Magazine, on our website, etc.
I brought up to him that he had told me directly just a few weeks earlier that the only reason he was competing with us in a city that we had already announced a show in was that he didn’t know we were working on it and that he couldn’t get out of his contract. Now he was somehow able to escape the “contract,” and was choosing to book a venue that he knew that we had already booked. His response was that he didn’t want to have to buy certain required permits for an event at his hotel venue, that he had already told his friends he was doing a show, and that he was too embarrassed to back out.
Jay broke his word to me that he would keep me informed about his show plans, with no other explanation than “I guess I didn’t do what I said I would” so I’m hard pressed to trust his promise that he won’t use our shows in the Carolinas as a platform to advertise his efforts in Myrtle Beach. For that reason and that reason only, we are not open to Jay vending at our Carolina or Georgia shows PRIOR to his show in July. He’s welcome to vend at our Florida or other out-of state shows, and is welcome to vend at our Carolina shows after July. It just doesn’t make good business sense for us to lend a platform that we have built at great expense to a competitor. Jay knows this, and to the extent that he’s claiming to be “banned” from our shows, he’s being less than truthful.
Regarding Charleston, we absolutely scheduled this show competitively with Jay’s Myrtle Beach efforts, and with good reason. Jay intentionally booked a show in a venue that we are already running advertising for, knowing based on our conversation that our ads in Reptiles Magazine and in other outlets would be in circulation in advance of his show. If you’ve got a copy of the new June issue of Reptiles, take a look at how he’s marketing his show. One $40 classified listing with the wrong state listed. It seems to us that one of his strategies it to hope for confusion between the show that we’re already advertising at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in September and his efforts at the same venue in July, efforts that he has yet to advertise in any substantial way.
We’ve spent too much time and effort over the years building our name in the Carolinas to risk that confusion. By choosing to book a venue that he knew we already had booked, Jay created a competitive situation in which we felt the need to protect our brand by clearly establishing that what Jay’s doing in July is NOT Repticon. The clearest way for us to do that is by planting our flag in a different South Carolina city on the same weekend, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Anyone anywhere certainly has the right to compete with any other business. That’s what a free market economy is all about. Let’s be clear: Jay has every right to compete with us. However, we as business owners certainly have the right to respond to competitors competitively.
While I don’t appreciate the fact that I feel that Jay has been less than truthful with us, we don’t have a personal issue with Jay and we don’t hold grudges. We’re NOT calling his “vendor list” or offering anyone free tables to cancel for Jay and book Charleston. Jay is not, and never has been “banned from Repticon shows.” If he wants to vend in Jacksonville or Orlando in May, he’s welcome. If he wants to vend in Columbia, Atlanta, or even Myrtle Beach after July, he’s welcome. If Jay booked any other promoter’s venue less than two months ahead of their show, broke promises to that promoter, then made untruthful comments about that promoter to others in the industry, I doubt very seriously that any other promoter would welcome him back.
At no point in this process have we been anything but direct and truthful with Jay. He cannot truthfully say the same thing about his actions. We’ve made no attempts to tear down Jay or his show. I know that Jay has a family that he’s trying support, and I wish that he had made different decisions about how he chose to conduct himself in pursuit of his plans. Business can be competitive, and in this case it is, but it doesn’t have to be personally negative. That’s not good for anyone.
We wish the vendors who choose to participate in Jay’s efforts the best of luck. If he has what it takes to produce a great show in July, more power to him. It’s not easy to do. We’ll be focusing on putting together a great show in Charleston, not tearing down Jay. If we both succeed, vendors and guests have more choices and everyone wins. If not, that’s the competitive nature of business. If Jay wants to talk, he’s got my e-mail and phone number. If he chooses instead to try to tear us down on public forums, that speaks volumes about how he chooses to do business and who is actually desperate.
For anyone who’s interested, here’s the complete e-mail chain between Jay and me from earlier this year. I’ve had absolutely no communication with Jay since:
Jay,
I mentioned to you in our previous conversation that we would react competitively if you moved forward with your plans, and that I would let you know first when we did.
We just signed a contract for an addtional show this summer, and I just posted some initial information on our website: http://www.repticon.com/charleston.html
I wanted to give you a "heads up" before you hear about this from other sources, and to let you know that after the July shows, you are still welcome to vend with us at any shows you'd like, if you choose to. If you're still interested in vending at the shows prior through July, let me know and we can talk next week.
Thanks,
Billy Healy
www.Repticon.com
(863) 268-4273 (voice)
(863) 268-8191 (fax)
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:49 AM, <jay@exoticjungle.net> wrote:
Billy,
Thanks for getting back with me. There are 7 shows before my show and 5 shows after my show. If I can not vend starting at the next show that I had on my schedule, than I have no interest in vending at any of your shows.
Jay
On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:42:37 -0500, Billy Healy <Billy@Repticon.com> wrote:
Jay,
I wanted to let you know that we just received some paperwork that we
were hoping for at the end of last week. We need to review that
paperwork, then we should be able to finalize how we will respond to
your show, including which shows will be open for you to vend at.
I can say that unless things change considerably, there should be no
problem with you vending at the shows that occur after your show is
scheduled.
I'll get back with you as soon as I know more.
Thanks,
Billy Healy
www.Repticon.com [1]
(863) 268-4273 (voice)
(863) 268-8191 (fax)
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:16 PM, wrote:
Here are the shows:
March
South Carolina, Tampa
May
Jacksonville, Orlando
June
South Carolina
July
Atlanta, Tampa
Sept.
Fire and Ice
October
Orlando
November
South Carolina, Tampa
Let me know
Thanks
Jay
On Mon, 7 Feb 2011 12:45:08 -0500, Billy Healy wrote:
Hi Jay,
We're still working through a few things, but I'm hoping we'll have
things settled by the end of this week.
What shows were you looking to vend at?
Billy Healy
www.Repticon.com [3] [1]
(863) 268-4273 (voice)
(863) 268-8191 (fax)
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 10:26 AM, wrote:
Hey Billy, just wondering if you had talked with everyone and knew
what was going on? I usually start buying this time of year getting
ready for shows and just need to know whats going on.
Thanks
Jay
On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:56:11 +0000, healybilly@gmail.com [4] [3]
wrote:
Jay - Cathy was in the hospital all weekend so we were not able to
talk much.
I'll call you when I've had a chance to talk to Cathy and Danny
more.
Thanks,
Billy
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
-----Original Message-----
From: jay@exoticjungle.net [5] [4]
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:43:58
To: Billy Healy
Subject: Re: Myrtle Beach/Repticon Shows
Hey Billy,
Just checking to see if you were able to talk yo everyone and see
if
you had a decision on our conversation? Call me when you have a
chance.
Thanks
Jay
Exotic Jungle
Quoting Billy Healy :
Hi Jay,
Were you able to check out your potential venue last Friday? Any
word on
your show plans?
Thanks,
Billy Healy
www.Repticon.com [6] [5]
(863) 268-4273 (voice)
(863) 268-8191 (fax)
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 5:19 PM, wrote:
hey billy, give me a call when you can. 754-224-1434
thanks
jay
exotic jungle
www.exoticjungle.net [7] [7]
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:36:03 -0500, Billy Healy
wrote:
> Hi Jay,
>
> I understand that you had a short conversation with Cathy
yesterday
> confirming that you've made tentative plans to promote a show in
Myrtle
> Beach, SC. As you probably know, we are promoting a show in
Myrtle
Beach
> in
> September.
>
> I wanted to let you know that we certainly understand the need
for
everyone
> to explore options to expand their revenue, and at this point
you
are
still
> welcome to vend at our shows. There will be no effect on your
placement,
> etc. Obviously, if you choose to place yourself in a business
that is
> directly competitive with us, we will be forced to treat you as
a
> competitor
> rather than as a customer.
>
> I'm a big believer in being straight-forward. If you could let
us know
how
> your discussions with the Myrtle Beach venue are resolved this
week, I'd
> greatly appreciate it.
>
> Thanks Jay,
>
> Billy Healy
> www.Repticon.com [8] [8]
> (863) 268-4273 (voice)
> (863) 268-8191 (fax)
|
| |
|
RE: Repticon- Friend or Foe to the Reptile Industr
|
Reply
|
|
by Peter84Jenkins on April 6, 2011
|
Mail this to a friend!
|
The last Repticon I attended was in 2007, and I only went to pick up captive bred animals that were prepaid, and I have no plans to return.
I am sickened by their slovenly choice of venue, and as stated before, the majority of vendors are peddling wild caught animals: or poachers exploiting wildlife sensitive to over collection.
The above post proves that this is nothing but business for Repticon, and to me that screams: we have no plans on regulating our vendors, as long as the money is good.
I have a young daughter whom I try to teach respect for wildlife and for nature, how can I justify bringing my family to a show where tables are full of ten gallons with everything from wild caught garter snakes, copperheads, timber rattlesnakes, and cobras with bleeding rostral scales.
If Jay’s show is of greater quality then people will see the difference and they will attend. I know I will.
|
| |
|
Email Subscription
You are not subscribed to this topic.
Subscribe!
My Subscriptions
Subscriptions Help
Check our help page for help using
, or send questions, comments, or suggestions to the
Manager.
|
