Tuesday, November 4, 2008

'Official' Opening Day

OK, so we're milking it a bit. We've had an 'opening party,' a 'soft opening day' and now our 'official opening day.' Which was on Saturday. We had lots of stuff going on. Our first ad was supposed to run on Thursday in the Delaware Crossroads section. Unfortunately, the News Journal screwed up and mis scheduled the ad for November 6th. Which left us without an ad for opening day. Bummer....luckily, our News Journal rep, Jason Lay,  quickly found a solution to our problem by offering up a much bigger ad in a bigger run of the paper for Friday. After about four hours cramming together the ad, I sent it off and we had a big ole ad in the Friday paper. 


Add the article that ran in the paper on Saturday and we were very nearly mobbed on Saturday! 

It. Was. Awesome!

We had Rocky Bluewinkle come and hang out with us for a couple hours. Rocky was wonderful, he worked our visitors and tried out our playtables, sat on our adirondack chairs in our reading oasis, and even got seasick on the pirate ship when the pirate steering the ship got a little crazy with the steering wheel. Video of Rocky's seasick adventures to follow. Rocky even bowed to our own World Yo-Yo Champion Tyler Severence as he did some two-handed looping in front of the store. 


We gave away all 75 of our limited edition YoYo Joe's logo yo-yos. We had hourly drawings and gave away lots of toys to people who entered. The first winner was an impossibly cute girl who was so excited that she won, she kept saying "I won, I won, I won, I won!" We took her picture with her cousins - check out that smile!




Vincenza Carrieri-Russo, Miss Delaware USA, came to YoYo Joe's in the evening to help us celebrate. My sister Wendy was on hand to shoot a couple pictures of her on deck of the pirate ship. Ahoy, there Miss Delaware!


Thanks to the Blue Rocks for sending Rocky, and to Vincenza and the folks at You've Been Sentenced, who set up Miss Delaware USA. 

Thanks to all of our customers who came out and made it a day to remember for all of us. It was wonderful hearing your stories from Mitchell's and your good wishes on our future. With luck, we'll be around at least 55 years!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to the Mitchell Family on another great store. We were very excited to be there on opening day, and our "impossibly cute little girl" who won the first prize has been playing band and having parades ever since Saturday! (Those were her cousins in the picture...)Thanks for the instrument set. Good Luck with the store and we are already huge fans!