The Tradeshow Circuit Head Honcho Hello for February 2013

Black and white, upper left picture, left to right: Mel Gasmen, our genius digital and marketing coordinator; me; Sara Hartman, our savvy ecommmerce manager; Trish Abbot, the indispensable VP of brand development. Color picture: Jim Papscoe, our president, joins us, looking oddly like one of the Village People.

I write this month’s Head Honcho Hello from my Times Square hotel room on a break from one of the three tradeshows for which Knock Knock mounts its own booth, the Spring New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF). I must say that at this point in my career it is more fun to write about tradeshows in a hotel bed …

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Matt Katzenson of Fine Lines Talks 10 Years With Knock Knock Flotsam & Jetsam

Matt Katzenson, CEO of Fine Lines Company and a longtime friend of Knock Knock, wrote this piece. His company became one of our rep groups early on and works, to this day, distributing our product wholesale to retailers. We’re treating this post as an indication that a certain someone already has his tenth-anniversary party hat on, making us feel oh-so …

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The Perils of the Falling K Head Honcho Hello for May 2012

At Knock Knock, we love our K’s. Letterform-wise they’re unique, with their splayed horizontal V’s branching out from military-erect I’s. Since ours repeat, they reduce to a convenient abbreviation: KK. One of the reasons I named the company Knock Knock is, as previously outlined in some of our marketing materials,* because of those graphically flanking K’s. At the time and …

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Complex (Like a Lion) Simple (Like a Lamb)

KISS—“Keep it simple, stupid.” Not my forte. I like things that have complexity and interest to them, and you may already know that one of my mottos (and I say “my” because successive Knock Knock writers and editors are delightfully more terse than I am) is “Why use fewer words when you could use more?” Even if you don’t know …

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A Day At the Fair—the International Gift Fair Flotsam and Jetsam

Clump-o-Lump Debut Each year in January, a handful of Knock Knockers head to New York for the New York International Gift Fair (where we have a booth) to introduce and sell our new Spring products to retailers. The show serves as one of our first opportunities to gauge how our new product may fair in the marketplace. It is always …

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