Girl Scouts isn’t just for girls.  Well, at least their B.I.G. Expo wasn’t.  We heard about the expo the first week in January and immediately checked into being an exhibitor.  With a little more than three weeks to go until the event, we (my parents and I) got busy making more Pencil Bugs and getting other products and marketing materials ready.   With a lot of hard work, we were ready for the event.

They were expecting between 4,000 and 5,000 attendees and since I had never done an event that large, I had no idea what to expect.  There were all kinds of exhibitors, activities, food, entertainment, and girls scouts of all ages.

Besides selling my products at my booth, I also had coloring pages for the kids as well as a large gift basket that people could enter to win by filling out an entry form with a few questions:

They didn’t even need to be present to win because I would be contacting them by email.  Simple, right?  Well, believe it or not, many of the entries didn’t have email addresses at all and some were illegible.  After sorting through hundreds of entries, we tossed the 120 that remained in a hat and pulled out one entry, and sent an email to the winner.  Immediately, we got a “no recipient” error back.  Oops!  Doubled checked the email address, tried it again but still the same error.

The second entry we pulled out of the hat was a valid email address but they didn’t respond within the time limit.  We didn’t want to have to wait too long to find the winner.  I was excited about awarding all the goodies to some lucky kid.

So once again, I shook up all the entries in the hat and pulled out the third entry.  BINGO!  I had a winner – Rhianna Anderson. Rhianna answers to the questions on the entry form were:

The gift basket included everything needed for a Pencil Bugs-themed birthday party.

Congratulations to Rhianna and thanks to everyone who stopped by my booth.