Hey, No Brand Heroes. We’ve been putting off this announcement as long as we could, but as many of you have guessed we’re now making it official: There will not be a No Brand Con 2024.
I’m going to be as transparent as possible. No one is more disappointed that we won’t be running a con this year than we are. While our 2023 event was a ton of fun, and (at least based on attendee surveys) a pretty great little con, we missed our attendance targets by a wide margin. And when I say “wide,” I mean wide.
Like by fifty percent.
It means that there just isn’t the money to run the event this year.
A lot of people don’t realize that running a convention like ours has operating costs that run year round, and our only source of funds is attendance at our events. These operating costs number in the thousands of dollars. Due to the pandemic, we obviously had to cancel any 2020 and 2021 dates, and that meant that those bills ate into the remaining funds we have.
We ran the 2022 event doing our best to keep the costs down without cutting anything from the attendee experience. And our attendance numbers actually were slightly higher than our 2019 convention, which normally would have put us in a good position — but again, we were starting from behind.
Very far behind.
We debated closing up shop in 2022, but a number of our staff decided they wanted to push forward with a 2023 event. We knew we needed to make some big changes though.
In the five conventions we ran in the Wisconsin Dells we saw a marked decrease in attendance every year. The small bump in 2022 was not enough to break this pattern. The spring was incredibly crowded, and we ended up in conflict with other events. Combined with issues we had with the physical facility in the Dells (including a large section of our panel room that was cordoned off due to a leak in the roof), we knew if we didn’t leave there, our convention wouldn’t last more than one or two years.
We moved the convention to a new city. We tried a new time of year. These were not decisions we made lightly, and knew they could end us. But with no future in the Dells, we saw it as our only way forward. These were all massive risks.
They didn’t pay off.
I’m a co-founder of this convention, and we started planning our 2002 event back in the year 2000. We were a handful of nerds with the audacity to think we could run our own convention.
And we did.
We ran twenty conventions. And I’m incredibly proud of that. Most cons don’t make it that long. No matter what does and doesn’t happen with No Brand Con in the future, we can be proud of that. We’re proud of the community we’ve built. We’re an all volunteer run event. None of us make a penny off of No Brand Con, and some of us have given a good chunk of our lives to this event. Our staff is here because we love doing this, full stop. We did something important here. We’re written in the history of the region — a number of cons in Wisconsin and Minnesota trace their roots to us.
I don’t want to end this on a negative note. A lot of us behind the scenes are hopeful that we can still keep this event going. But there are challenges, and we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep.
But, uh, if you’ve got a spare $30,000, hit us up, okay?
