Off to APP 2016

We’re off to APP 2016! It’s that time of year again; time we take the Infinite piercers (and half the rest of the staff) and head to Las Vegas for the 21st Annual Association of Professional Piercers Conference and Exposition, taking place from July 24 to 29, 2016. This year, we’ll be taking all the Infinite piercers (Ed, Andru, Robert, and Zach) and our apprentice Maddie, along with Jes, Andi, and me. This is the 21st annual conference, and will mark the 20th time I have attended.

So who’s minding the store while we’re gone? This coming week we’ll have the amazing Paul Espinoza at Infinite, our go-to guest to cover shifts during Conference week—and the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He’ll be here covering from Saturday, July 23 to the following Friday, July 29. We’ll also have retired Infinite piercer Jay McColm helping out on Saturday, July 23 and Friday, July 29. Jay worked at Infinite for five years before leaving in 2014 to pursue horticultural studies while working at Longwood Gardens. We’re excited to have both of them at the shop, and we know our clients will be in good hands. Dustin, Tiara, and Stephanie will be at the shop too, to make sure things run smoothly while we’re gone

The annual APP conference is an important event for all of us in the industry, as it’s the biggest piercing-only event in the world. It brings body modification practitioners from not only all over the United States, but from all over the globe for five days of classes, lectures, roundtable discussions, meetings, and workshops. It’s the most extensive and intense week of continuing education our industry has to offer—and that’s why we take as many people from the studio as we can. We’re also there not just to learn, but to give back to a community that has given us so much. During the week, both Andru and Zach will be working as volunteers, with duties from manning classroom doors to taking shifts at the APP  booth. Eduardo will be helping to oversee the vendor exposition space (along with Philly neighbor Luis Garcia) and teaching several piercing workshops. I’ll be co-teaching Male Genital Piercings: A Dual Approach with industry veteran Elayne Angel, revisiting a class we first taught together at the APP conference in 2014.

There is also the vendor exposition. Each year, the best of the best of body jewelry manufacturers show off their products on the expo floor in Las Vegas. We get to talk to all our sales representatives (and company owners) face-to-face, which is a welcome change from correspondence usually limited to email (or phone) during the rest of the year. We get to see new products, as many vendors time the rollout of new products to coincide with this event. And we buy jewelry. Lots of it, from limited production items to one-of-a-kind pieces. The annual APP Conference Exposition is an amazing opportunity to stock our shelves with unique jewelry, some of which we can get no other time of the year. This is where our second job starts, as while the piercers are taking (or teaching) classes, our web crew will be photographing jewelry, writing product descriptions, and building jewelry products for upload into both our in-store POS system and our online store. We’ll be hard at work getting jewelry up online while we’re in Las Vegas, and ready to put out on the shelves at the studio as soon as we get back to Philadelphia.

This week will be a lot of work, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. Most of us look forward to this event all year.

 

Lastly, we’re excited to be able to unveil our new apparel designs! For the last several years we’ve introduced a new t-shirt design for Conference, and this time is no different. This year’s shirts are an homage to the infamous Modern Primitives t-shirt from RE/Search publications that was originally printed in the late ’80s. Our shirt is a faithful recreation of the old design, but has our own genital drawings, the ones featured throughout both the male and female genital piercing pages on the Infinite site. It’s a design that has a special appeal for those of us who were working as piercers when the original shirt came out—and there will be plenty of us at Conference who were there the first time around. For others, it’s a nod to a piece of piercing history. For everyone else, it’s a great opportunity to wear line drawings of penises and vulva on a shirt! These are now for sale at the studio and in our online store, as both high-quality t-shirts and unisex tank tops.

Like every year, we’ll be arriving at Conference with plenty of shirts for our industry friends. For anyone not attending the APP event in Las Vegas, we’ll be offering a special half-price sale on not only our new shirt design, but on all apparel while we’re gone—and for one week after we get back. This means all shirts, hoodies, booty shorts and baby clothes on the Infinite site are 50% off, from midnight this Saturday, July 23,  until midnight on the night of Saturday, August 6. Just use the code APP2016 at checkout to take advantage of the discount.

So check our online store this week for new products, and follow our social media feeds to get a first look at what will be coming back with us to Philly. We’ll see you in a week!