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Memories of Santa

Hold on to your reindeer, because Come As You Are is already in Christmas mode, apparently. For the first time, CAYA participated in a holiday preview event for Canadian media and while we know that it is way to early to start discussing the holidays, it was a really interesting event.

We schlepped our wares exactly two blocks east to the Burroughes Building, unintentionally became the FourSquare mayor of said building, watched some Coronation Street in the elevator, and generally had a blast meeting and talking to some really awesome people.

If you've read our August newsletter, you'll already know that Sarah is busy rearing the next generation of CAYA co-op members (she's on parental leave) and this was our first event without our fearless event coordinator here to guide us (and you know, to do the heavy lifting.) But we persevered, and we think, it all came together quite nicely - especially with the help of our freshly minted display and merchandise coordinator (we're such a little coop, but we insist on giving everyone very formal sounding titles.)

The attendees were from all sorts of Canadian media - from blogs to national magazines - and it was lovely to see some friendly faces and some folks who became pretty darn friendly by the end of the day. A special shout out to the folks at women.ca for totally making our day with their unbridled interest, and one of our new favourite blogs luckypennydaily.com. Please don't think we're trying to uh, score, with media with these mentions, we just like to acknowledge awesome folks when they cross our paths.

A lot of folks asked us that day about our 'demographics'. That is, they really want to know about your gender, age, relationship status and orientation - and well, we have a really hard time answering those questions because we really don't think about the world in those terms. Sure, we meet you in-store and online every day, but we work hard to not make assumptions about your lives because we think our being open provides a better experience for you.

Perhaps because we've always had assumptions made about our genders, ages, relationships and orientations, we're just more sensitive to these things, but we believe strongly in being the sex shop and sexuality resource for everyone - not just couples, or women or queer folks. We want all of you to feel comfortable walking through our doors and visiting our website, and we really hope we were also able to do the same for all of the editors and writers who passed through our holiday preview this week.