Monthly Archives: March 2017
BreyerWest 2017 Part I
| March 25, 2017 | Posted by aidanstoytrove under Model Horse |
BreyerWest 2017 Part I
BreyerWest 2017 is now in full swing. We had a rather rough start to the trip. We had a hard time cramming everything into the trailer. We hit the road around 8:30am on Thursday. Less than a half mile into the trip we heard a large BANG and SCREEEEEEECH coming from the cargo trailer. It sounded like a tire had blown. Luckily, we were in a spot that we could easily pull over at. It ended up being the tow stand. We forgot to put the locking pin in place, phew!
We drove the trailer for the very first time on Highway 199 which is a very narrow windy road which drops off a cliff into the Smith River. Driving parts of that road can be rather nail biting. Once we hit Interstate 5 it was clear sailing. We stopped for a quick lunch in Roseburg and arrived at the Linn County Fairgrounds around 2:30pm. I quickly ran into the Expo to meet my new friend, Elayne Watrus who is vending beside us. That was quite exciting but then the real work began.
In order to fit all of our model horse inventory inside of the trailer, the shelves had to be assembled inside of it. This meant that we had to pull ALL the inventory off the shelves before we could unload the shelves from the trailer and begin setting up our booth. We checked the weather and it was supposed to start raining at 6pm and I kept checking the time. Moving the shelves inside the Expo and tweaking them was quite the chore. Then the banner refused to connect where we wanted it. We were finally starting to load inventory onto the shelves when it proceeded to dump rain outside, right on top of all of the inventory that we had just dragged to the side of the trailer in order to unload the shelves. We all darted outside to drag the inventory back into the trailer but the boxes still got pretty wet and we were positively drenched.
We worked on the booth until 11pm on Thursday evening. We were the last people in the building and still had setting up to do in the morning. Exhausted, we dragged ourselves to the car and unhitched the trailer, or rather TRIED to unhitch the trailer. It seemed to be stuck on the tow ball. We eventually got it off after a lot of prying and fiddling and even a few choice words. Even more frustrating, the trailer is not hitching correctly now but is a problem that we will have to solve before we leave on Sunday.
We opted to stay in a hotel in Salem as it was considerably cheaper than staying close to the Fairgrounds. We drove to the hotel and checked in. We had FOUR big boxes waiting for us when we arrived. 3 were full of Copperfox Horses and one had some customs that were being returned after having been repaired. We filled up a hotel cart with all the boxes and our laptops and lugged our suitcases behind us as the cart was completely full. We went up to the fourth floor where our room was. When we opened the door to our room, SURPRISE, the bed was unmade and there were empty bottles on the counter. We trooped on back down to the front desk to request a new room. The second room worked out just fine but gosh we were all so grumpy! We hadn’t eaten in 12 hours and the only open food place we could find was Dennys but hey, it was food!
We finished eating and went back to the hotel where I dove into the contents of the Copperfox boxes. Hubby typed away at some pricing sheets for our sales booth. When we were finished (or finished enough to finish in the morning, LOL) it was creeping up on 3am. Our alarm was set for 7am. I had a hard time getting out of bed but we arrived back and the Horse Fair and Expo center right around setup time at 8am. I helped finish what I could in the booth until 9am when I needed to switch over to BreyerWest show mode. Last year, the BreyerWest Open Show ended fairly early and we scheduled the Copperfox Horses to go on sale at 3pm. I was hoping that this would give everyone a chance to take a good look at the horses and that the show would be nearing the end around 3pm. WRONG. The show ran until closer to 6pm. My hubby, the trooper that he is, dealt with a whole MOB of people wanting to purchase Copperfox horses. We were happily able to rehome 10 of the horses and ponies on Friday. We will have more horses available on Saturday and hopefully some on Sunday as well.
I’ll try to write a bit more about the BreyerWest Open show tomorrow and I will take some more pictures tomorrow too. Goodnight everyone!
BreyerWest 2017 YouTube Video Playlist
BreyerWest 2017 Part 1 Blog Post
BreyerWest 2017 Part 3 Blog Post
I Am Officially a Copperfox Ambassador & BreyerWest 2017
| March 21, 2017 | Posted by aidanstoytrove under Model Horse |
I Am Officially a Copperfox Ambassador & BreyerWest 2017
Good morning everyone! Things have been busy busy busy here at Aidan’s Toy Trove. Our eBay Store is closed for business until Monday, March 27th but we may bring it out of vacation mode over weekend. We won’t be returning home until late Sunday evening or quite likely the wee hours of the morning on Monday, March 27th. Our website store will remain open but nothing will ship from here until, at the very earliest, Monday and quite possibly Tuesday, March 28th.
For those that didn’t see, our last juicy news tidbit is that I am officially a Copperfox Ambassador. I am honored to have been offered this role. I am positively thrilled to announce that we will have a nice selection of Copperfox horses available for sale at our BreyerWest Sales booth.
Here is a link to our initial BreyerWest blog post:
https://aidanstoytrove.com/breyerwest-2017-come/
You can read my official Copperfox Ambassador profile here:
http://www.copperfoxmodelhorses.com/our-blog/meet-our-copperfox-ambassador-betsy-valley
In my new role as a Copperox Ambassador, I will be attending model horse shows with Copperfox horses in Washington, Oregon and California! These horses (and ponies!) will be available to purchase in person. We will be planning our shows and posting a list of events that we will be attending at a later date.
Becky Benfield of Copperfox is an absolute goddess. We have been in contact for only 2 weeks and Becky managed to get us Copperfox horses shipped to our hotel in time for the BreyerWest event. This absolutely blows my mind. Keep in mind, the Copperfox horses shipped from the United Kingdom and BreyerWest is being held in the US. Just WOW! In fact, the horses are sitting at the hotel right now waiting for us to come and collect them. It’s almost torture to know the horses are there and not being able to see them in person right NOW. With the Copperfox horses being a brand new addition for us, I haven’t had the time to promote them as I would like to do. I will provide more information about them after the conclusion of BreyerWest.
These are stock photos of just a sampling of the horses that we will have available to purchase at booth at BreyerWest:
We do have a limited number of Copperfox horses and we will be limiting Copperfox sales so that all the horses aren’t sold out the first day. We want to make sure that everyone has a fair chance at them and we want people to be able to see just how great they are. For those of you showing at the BreyerWest Open Show (which includes ME), I guarantee that we will absolutely not be selling any Copperfox horses prior to the lunch break. At least, I hope there’s a lunch break, LOL. This way you can hop on over to our booth and have a look when you have a break in your classes. We will announce the specifics once we have them figured out. Pricing won’t be revealed prior to BreyerWest and this particular batch of horses will not be available for sale online (not that we expect to have any leftovers.)
We spent a lot of time working on the layout of our BreyerWest booth over the past weekend. Unfortunately, the weather here has been all rain and today is calling for thunderstorms. We wanted to at least run a mock setup of our BreyerWest booth but the only space we have available to do that is in the driveway and we can’t do that in the rain L We also need to be mindful of loading merchandise into the trailer during the rain and pick the least wet times that we can! Speaking of, we have a brand new cargo trailer. Here it is on our first day of loading and we anticipate that the trailer will be FULL by the time we finish loading it.
Yesterday, I washed, priced and packed horses from dawn until dusk. These were mostly loose horses. Today’s focus will be on retired NIB horses. We have a LOT of those that we hope find new homes because they take up a lot of room (in OUR home, LOL.) We already loaded up our Breyer 2017 Lineup.
You won’t see much at all from us about online sales until after BreyerWest. We will be making blog posts to the website and posting pictures to our Instagram account throughout BreyerWest. Our goal is to post a whole bunch of model horse eye candy. Last year, Breyer had some of the BreyerFest Special Runs on hand. If Breyer brings some again this year, I promise your BreyerFest Special Run pictures galore =D That’s it for now, I need to do some more pony packing!
BreyerWest 2017 – In Person Pickups
| March 19, 2017 | Posted by aidanstoytrove under Model Horse |
BreyerWest 2017 – In Person Pickups
We will be bringing all our new Breyer stock including the 2017 Breyer Lineup and Corral Pals and many of our BreyerFest Special Runs. We will have a large selection of retired horses both New In Box and out of box. We will have Web Special Runs and other event Special Runs. We will also have another super special brand of model horses on display and available for purchase!
We will be closing our eBay store on Monday evening. We have many unique Breyer and other model horses listed there that we are NOT planning on bringing to BreyerWest. These include ALL of the single quantity listings (including NIB retired stock.) This is because we already have the eBay horses packaged and stored in our rather complex inventory system.
We are offering in person pickups for any of our single quantity listings in our eBay Store that are located here in California. We also have a separate New Jersey location. Horses from New Jersey cannot be brought to BreyerWest. You can find the Item Location towards the top of the eBay listing.
If you would like us to bring something from our eBay store (California location only!) please email us at aidanstoytrove@gmail.com We will send you a Paypal Invoice which will be at a DISCOUNTED price from eBay’s price. The horse must be paid for in full by end of day on Wednesday March 22nd or we will not pack it to bring to BreyerWest. This will save on shipping and we will give you a better than eBay price. Your horse(s) can be picked up on Friday, Saturday or Sunday at our BreyerWest Booth.
Here is a link to my last blog post which gives a bit more information about us at BreyerWest 2017! We look forward to meeting all of the BreyerWest attendees 🙂
BreyerWest 2017 Here We Come!
| March 18, 2017 | Posted by aidanstoytrove under Model Horse |
BreyerWest 2017 Here We Come!
Oh my goodness how time FLIES. Where on earth did the entire beginning to the year 2017 go??? This year, Aidan’s Toy Trove will be vending for the first time at BreyerWest 2017! We had grand plans of running advertisements so people would know to look for us but guess what? That never happened and BreyerWest is now officially less than 1 week away! We are currently winding down on online sales to give us time to prepare for BreyerWest. We will be bringing HUNDREDS of model horses to sell, new and used.
BreyerWest takes place at the Northwest Horse Fair and Expo in Albany Oregon. BreyerWest will be inside the Santiam building at the Horse Expo and runs for 3 days, March 24th – 26th. You can see the schedule for all 3 days of the Horse Expo (including that of BreyerWest ) at this link:
http://equinepromotions.net/northwest-horse-fair/attend/schedule/
There are lot of real horse events going on the entire time and TONS of shopping, for everything horse! And this of course includes shopping for model horses! Our booth is number is V8 within the Santiam building and will be diagonal from BreyerWest. We will be vending alongside Elayne Watrus who will have a large selection of her Breyer Custom Steampunk Horses for sale!
BreyerWest will be hosting the Open Model Horse Show on Friday and the Youth Model Horse Show on Saturday. On top of this, there will be workshops run by top hobbyists. These will be both free and paid. And of course, there will be free Stablemate Painting all 3 days!
If you are lucky enough to be attending the Northwest Horse Fair and Expo, please stop by our booth and say hi!
BreyerFest 2017 Darjeeling – The 8th Special Run Revealed
| March 17, 2017 | Posted by aidanstoytrove under Model Horse |
BreyerFest 2017 Darjeeling – The 8th Special Run Revealed
Today, Breyer revealed Darjeeling, the 8th BreyerFest 2017 Special Run! He is the old Chris Hess Semi – Rearing Stallion or Diablo mold. My guess that he would be the Fighting Stallion mold in my last blog post wasn’t quite correct =p Darjeeling is a gorgeous glossy bay semi-leopard appaloosa that was designed by artist Sommer Prosser. I am a big fan of Sommer’s art work and feel that she designs some of Breyer’s very best colors!
Darjeeling is named after the West Bengal are of India that is most noted for its tea industry and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.
Here is what Breyer had to say about Darjeeling on the BreyerFest Blog:
Let’s start off the weekend by meeting Darjeeling!
Darjeeling is on Chris Hess’s semi-rearing mustang mold (number 87) from the 1960’s. Darjeeling is a richly-shaded bay semi-leopard appaloosa with a star, snip, a single sock, lighting marks, and mottled skin. This latest Special Run model was expertly designed by Sommer Prosser.
Darjeeling is a region in the West Bengal area of India and is most notable for its tea industry and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Settled by the British during the colonial period in the mid-19th Century, this city is a melting pot of Indian and British traditions. This Breyer Darjeeling is named so because of his tea-stained coloring and his patterning reminded us of a snow-dappled mountain top, much like stunning views of Kangchenjunga in Darjeeling.
