We divided the locations into 3 areas: Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. We didn’t want to dash in-n-out without giving each shop some decent viewing and doing the make n’ take on site. We were definitely optimistic.
This year’s theme was Hollywood movies. Each store picked a movie and built a 6x6 make n’ take page to go with the theme. Not all of them were creative. You would think for someone in this line of business, they would be putting some effort in the creativity department. WRONG. Some of them were so low in design quality that it didn’t feel like anyone was behind the process. One store didn’t even have anything ready the first weekend. Then why bother to participate.
The shop hop was a way for local stores to generate revenue, especially important during this recessional time. The customers would pay a $14.95 for a blank passport and a blank bracelet. Then they would visit each stores to get the store stamp onto the passport. With both the passport and the bracelet, you get a 20% discounts on merchandises. In addition, with $10 purchase before tax and discount, you would get the make n’ take for free. With $20 purchase, you would get a store charm. Otherwise, you may buy the page for $2.50 and the charm for $8.99.
It wasn’t a bad deal at all, assuming you were not planning on doing this on all 35 stores; that would be like $700+ to qualify for all the charms. On their Facebook page, quite a few ladies did get all 35 stamps. Now, they didn’t say if they bought all the charms or got all the charms via store purchases. Regardless that was still tons of money. To offset this, at the end of the run, your name is put into a drawing for prizes at 3 different levels.
On day 1, we went to the Los Angeles area, mainly the three stores closest to me:
A to Z Scrapbooking - This is my “home store” where I purchased my passport and where I need to return it for prize drawing. The store is filled with lots of stuffs. They had a decent effort with the movie “Grease”, they picked.
The next one is Sonja’s Scrapbooking Spot. I have been wanting to stop in here for a while now. With the high price of rent, there just weren’t too many scrapbook stores in the city of Los Angeles!!! Even though the store is small, we love the bright interior and the more unique merchandises it carried. The layout pages displayed in the store were “quality” stuff. I took picture of many displays for my own inspiration. We love the classes they host too, in fact, Vanessa and I signed up for one: Tattered Traveler Class with Monika Thomas, to do our books from the Egypt trip! Their movie theme is Sex and the City, right up our alley. And look at the double page make n’ take too….
The last store of the day was Stampin' from the Heart. It was an older store, as indicated from the store name; they mainly concentrated on stamping; tons and tons of stamps. We had fun with doing the make n’ take onsite, kind of like learning a new technique using the ink, sparkles, more sparkles, and some kind of gel medium. I like one of their upcoming classes, but Vanessa didn’t. This is a great store for mixed media art. The movie theme here is Blue Hawaii with Elvis. Yeap, we took pictures with Elvis…
It was a good first day….now we headed over to Spa Chakra for our pampering session.
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