When the Comic Con Bengaluru team reached out to us, we had about two months to prepare for our first major event.
We are still a team of just four, so preparing for something of this scale meant taking on almost every part of it ourselves. Production, stock, booth planning, display, logistics, games, pre-orders and all the smaller decisions in between. With more than 15,000 people expected through the venue, it was easily the biggest physical audience Tohfa Shofa had been in front of.
There was also a more interesting question for us to answer: what does a brand like ours do at Comic Con?
We work across art, objects and decor. Comic Con comes with a very particular world of fandom, characters and pop culture, and it would have been easy to create a collection simply to fit into that environment.
We chose not to.
There was no reason to become a different version of Tohfa Shofa for one weekend. If we were going to introduce the brand to thousands of new people, we wanted them to meet it as it actually is: colourful, artist-led, rooted in our own visual language and interested in making familiar objects feel a little less familiar.
So we took our collections with us, launched our magnetic frames at the event and built the experience around the work we already believed in.
That turned out to be the right decision.
The response over the two days was far beyond what we had expected. People spent time at the booth, picked up the products, asked about how they were made and brought friends back with them. We sold more than 5,000 pieces across our collections, and the magnetic frames found an audience almost immediately.
But the most valuable part of Comic Con was not simply the number of products we sold.
It was seeing the brand work in a room where it was not designed specifically to belong.
For a young brand, there is always a temptation to keep adjusting yourself to the audience in front of you. This weekend was a useful reminder that there is another way to build. You can understand the room, respect it and still remain clear about what you bring into it.
The four of us ended the weekend exhausted. We had set up the booth ourselves, decorated it, managed stock and orders, handled pre-orders and somehow found time to keep the games running for the children who kept coming back.
It was intense, but it was also one of those weekends that makes a small team feel much bigger.
We came to Comic Con wondering how Tohfa Shofa would fit in.
We left much more interested in how far it could go by staying itself.
