2018 marks our 10th consecutive WordCamp, so I thought a couple of posts honoring that were in order. My first in this series is something that actually has been requested – for someone that’s been involved in all 10 WordCamp Miami conferences…. what swag stood out most in my mind?
Shirts
I think out of all swag and items we’ve made to thank our volunteers, speakers, and attendees… shirts is probably the category I take the most pride in. It’s really great to go to other WordCamps and see people wearing WCMIA shirts (we try not to date all of our shirts for this reason). We were among the first to offer women’s sizes standard, and we managed to also produce shirts for kids along the way – some of which became so popular parents wanted to buy them for themselves (someday you might see Wapuu shirts in the swag store!).
Lunchboxes
These were speaker gifts and very impressed how they came out. We did three versions (fitting in with our 80s theme): Miami Vice, Back To The Future, and Stranger Things. Back To The Future was the most popular, in case you were wondering.
Wappu Uno Cards
This was a surprise hit that year, and looking back it’s easy to see why. We took advantage of the Wapuu designs in Github and each cards represented a unique, colorful Wappu (at the time we covered most that existed in Github). This also happened to coincide with Wapuu’s 5th anniversary, which made it even more cool. The Wapuu cards are open sourced and available on Github. Someone even made a mobile app based on our cards.
Playing with the best WP swag from #wcmia. Love the 5th Aniversary Wapuu UNO cards ^_^ Thanks @wordcampmiami! 🙂 pic.twitter.com/dT5KApIefU
— Rocío Valdivia (@rociovaldi) March 11, 2016
Speaker Cards
Relatively cheap to print, but takes effort to extract information from speakers (some speakers are particularly choosy about their photos) and make the cards. This first appeared during WordCamp Miami 2012 (I think). Literally had people not attending sessions trying to trade with other attendees to get the cards. It was (and still is) a great networking tool. Also we had comments that people liked the cards just so they had speaker’s name and Twitter info. They’ll be back in 2018 for sure.
Wapuu Dominos
These speaker gifts were a natural progression from the Wapuu Uno Cards and the box gives off a great Miami/Cuban vibe.
Happiness Bars
These were an “easter egg” in WordCamp Miami 2016. Cheap to print. If there was a candy bar of WordPress then “Happiness Bars” would be it. The covers are open sourced and available on Github (wrap them around a Hershey bar and you’re good to go). Of course, please the Happiness Bars in your WordCamp’s Happiness Bar… mind blown.
Playing Cards
Simply a deck of playing cards but each card had a different WordPress function and a description of that function. Anyone who was a coder loved these.
Pins
Pins have been a trend recently, especially among those who visit multiple WordCamps. WordCamp Miami tries to come out with one or two unique ones each year and gives people a chance to try to collect them all. Kids especially loved the Wapuu ones – although we produced numerous pins over the past 10 years.
Drinking Containers
For a WordCamp organizer, drinking containers might be like children… you publicly state you love them all… but there’s always a favorite. Ok, scratch that… my kids might read this someday. In any case over almost a decade I think we pretty much touched on almost any kind of drinking container in our limited price range.
Badges
For the past 3 years, we’ve been using pretty cool custom badges – kinda have to see one in person. Water proof, very well printed. Highly customized – they are as much a swag item as a button or pin. For 2018 we are upping the customization with a new design.