Dealers Den Curation Update 1

This announcement is for our Dealers, firstly to apologise for the delay in getting information to you and explain where we’re at right now. This year the Dealer’s Den saw a huge increase in applications across the board. The Den team felt the best way of handling this was to introduce a curation policy to ensure the Den had a wide variety of dealers, offering a wide variety of products.

Part of the policy was to avoid situations where a Dealer who may sell out in only one day, or was intending to only take a limited number of commissions (for delivery after the convention) would close their stand early, leaving a gap which could otherwise be filled by someone else. These Dealers would be offered an alternative in the form of one of our pop-up shops. This is why some dealers started seeing unsuccessful emails before anything else really occurred.

The higher management of the con were alerted to this and requested the curation policy be worked on together, so that if any dealer contested the decision there was a scalable chain of review.

First the Den team, then their Associate Director and then to the full Directors.

This meant that the original curation document needed a full review, to make sure that every dealer had the confidence of being reviewed, not just by the Den team, but by those up the chain if needed.

Unfortunately, this takes time – and while we now have a working document we know that some emails have gone out already, leaving some of you with questions we hope to resolve in our next announcement explaining how the policy works.

Also new for this year for the Dealer’s Den team was a requirement to send key important messaging through the Communications team, where previously they have published their own announcements. While the Dealer’s Den Twitter/X account will still be active with dealer interactions, going forward ConFuzzled wants our communications to be clear, but also uniform. This means all departments will be following the same process for communicating with the attendees when it comes to important information.

We’d like to close by saying firstly we’re sorry for any anxiety this has caused, and that any person originally rejected in the initial run will be reviewed. We want Dealers to know that the curation will be conducted fairly, and dealers will be offered the chance to appeal if their original decision is upheld. Ultimately the Den does have a finite amount of tables and unfortunately we anticipate there will be some unsuccessful applications for the 2024 convention.

Another announcement will follow this one shortly, detailing the full curation process.