Note: This Event was part of my “Secret Experimental Event Series” for Big Weekend Calendars and The Austin Events Wall Calendar. You can read more about the event series in this post.
If you are looking for similar events check out my weird Austin, unique Austin, and immersive Austin lists.
Event Premise
The concept is simple: I make a giant cornhole game, paint the cover of the calendar on it, lend it to a popular brewery, and get a lot of attention on social media. Then people buy calendars like crazy.
The game would be one-sided instead of two. The board would be 12 feet by 24 feet. Sadly that did not make it a world record. But unlike the world record holder, mine was playable and I believe if I pursued it I could have had the record for world’s largest playable cornhole game.
And possibly the world record for worst executed great marketing idea, as you will see…
Here is the event description. You can see the original even listing here on the Big Weekend Calendars website.
Come Play Giant Cornhole
This event is part of the Austin Events 2020 wall calendar’s Secret Unpublished Event Series.
Hey, we made a cornhole game that’s really really big. Like 300 square feet. I don’t know if it’s playable, but you should come over and see if it works.
Things to know:
- This is for real.
- If only one person shows up, I’ll help you throw the bags.
- If a lot of people show up, we’ll have to put a lot of people on each team.
- I don’t know what’s in the bags, but it isn’t corn.
Where and When:
Unlike the other events, this event will happen multiple times at multiple locations. When it pops up, the email list is notified. Subscribe to get notified!
Making Giant Cornhole
It seemed like such a simple idea.
Designing Giant Cornhole
I called up my friend, Amanda Jones at Collection Rert. She is both an artist and handyperson and was perfect for helping with this job. She was happy to take it on but said it would take some experimentation to develop. For instance, what would these playable bags be made of? They would have to take a beating but also be light enough to throw. How would we make the game transportable?
Also, what were the rules of cornhole? Neither of us really played the game.
It turns out knowing the rules didn’t matter but all the other stuff we didn’t know did matter.
There was a lot of experimenting with materials and designs in July and August. Here’s some photos to give you an idea of what we came up with:
Here’s the final unpainted board (we just made one side). It worked great and looked fantastic. I felt confident people would love it and I’d be sold out of calendars in no time.
Painting Giant Cornhole
Next was painting. I talked with my printer rep at Capital Printing Company and he said they could actually print on 4×8 plywood for about $150 a sheet. That seemed high and my friend Wendy said it would be easy to paint and she was excited to do it. I had my doubts but she was offering free labor so I said sure. Some other friends were excited about helping paint it as well.
To paint it we needed a projector, which I had to borrow from my friend Matt and Vianca. I also had to buy various colors of paint and brushes and tape and other stuff from Home Depot. There’s no such thing as a single trip to Home Depot, either. But Wendy assured me it was going to be “so easy”.
First we had to prime the wood. That took a few easy hours.
Then we decided to paint the background color across all of them. Just another few easy hours.
Then the next day I realized that bugs and leaves had landed on the paint and got stuck on them. So I spent a couple easy hours sanding them out.
They needed to be touched up, but I didn’t want more bugs and leaves on them so we had to take the boards into my screened in porch.
Wendy made the design and split it up into 9 different projections. Then we “easily” spent another 4 hours projecting the designs onto the boards and taping them.
For some reason I don’t remember now, we took them all out into the yard again to paint some of the sections. I don’t remember how we kept the bugs off. Perhaps it was hotter that day and dried more quickly or the paint was not as attractive to bugs and leaves. Or not as adhesive. At any rate, we didn’t have issues this time.
Then, we decided to take them into the porch again because apparently the job wasn’t going to be easy enough for us if we didn’t keep moving nine giant panels up stairs and through a screen door.
From there, Wendy and Iain helped me finish it over the course of a few days and about 15-20 more easy hours, lots of layers and lots of touchup. Did I mention it was August?
It also rained one of these days. In August. So I plunked down about $100 for a tarp large enough to cover a small house.
Some of the paint (due to the dye, perhaps) was peeling. Another $200 of acrylic sealer and it was sealed.
It was now done. Finally. Complete. The hard part was over.
No it wasn’t.
Taking Giant Cornhole On The Road
During construction I had been calling breweries and festivals expecting them to fall all over themselves for the world’s largest easiest playable cornhole game. The enthusiastic reception to the idea was nearly universal:
“We already got a cornhole”.
But you don’t have one THIS size.
You have one the RIGHT size. The SANE size. The not-going-to-regret-it size.
We have a 500 pound fantastic looking pain in the ass. Don’t you want it?
“But who will keep an eye on it when it’s here?”
Ah yes. This overlooked point would be the undoing of Giant Cornhole. Well, one of the many undoings. The cornhole was built to be moved easily (Wendy easily). As such, the top was just 1/8” plywood. It made a great boom when the bags landed on it.
But the sound it made when you stepped on it was: craaaaack.
People had to stay off Giant Cornhole.
Another issue was that it was the same shape as a ramp. A very tempting ramp. Even though we painted the universal “stay the off this” black and white stripes on the base, I could tell from early tests that not everyone was from this universe. People were always stepping on it to get their bags back…until that first step went craaaack. Then they suddenly understood this universe.
But kids don’t understand. Dogs don’t understand. Drunks don’t understand.
So my plan to set it up at family friendly outdoor dog-friendly breweries and let people have it it, unchaperoned, was not going to work.
Another unforeseen issue: you had to crawl under it to get your bags and it was a little dangerous under there. Especially with people from another universe falling through it from above you.
I asked Amanda to make some modifications to it to make it stronger and safer but I could see there was going to be no affordable design that would keep people off it.
I was going to have to set it up for the day, babysit it, and take it back. Every day. Ugh.
This is the point where I should have burned it. But optimism and the fallacy of sunk cost got the better of me to and I decided to forge ahead.
Vida Pura
I talked to Vida Pura Juicery which was up the street from me and had a big empty yard out front. The liked the idea and had a truck (did I mention I had no way to transport Giant Cornhole?). They were super cool in helping me get it and set it up. It wouldn’t have happened without them. Please go there and buy all the juices. They are super nice.
So it’s August. It’s hot as hell. I’ve spent the last two hours setting this thing up and I’m ready for the crowds on Manor road.
The crowds show up.
Except they are showing up across the street at Bird Bird Biscuit. They are waiting in long lines to get greasy biscuits while I have the Pure Life over here with a giant cornhole game the likes of which the world has never seen because no one else had this bad idea but me.
For the next 6 hours Bird Bird was packed. Meanwhile I had about 10 friends show up and maybe the same number of strangers. I was dripping in sweat, hanging out by myself most of the time. Ugh.
This is the point where I really should have burned it.
I HAVE A GIANT CORNHOLE. DON’T YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH IT????
Brewtorium
I had no interest in doing more manual labor with this thing. I would just suck it up and hire people to go to events and set it up, babysit it, and take it back to my house at the end of the day.
This is when I learned:
- Movers are expensive.
- To get the cornhole there in the morning and back at night required moving it twice.
- Movers are twice as expensive when you move things twice.
Additionally:
- Movers don’t want to babysit cornhole all day. You’ll have to get someone else to do that.
It just kept getting more and more complicated. Not only did I have to find all these people, I had to train them. And not only did I have to train them, but they would flake on me.
My next event was at Brewtorium. They were having a big anniversary party and would love to have us but couldn’t afford anyone to babysit it. Ugh. I even offered to pay their people to do it. No one was available.
I found a small company to move it. I also found someone to babysit it. I couldn’t be there because I had previous plans to go camping and also I hate manual labor.
So I’m out camping at Pedernales and I check my voicemail Saturday morning (event day). Brewotrium says no one has shown up. A few frantic calls later (while my friends enjoyed a nice morning of coffee and talking about nature) I realized the movers were flaking. Ugh.
I called many other companies trying to set up a last minute thing. After an hour or so my optimism gave out and I had to call Brewtorium and apologize. I also still had to pay my labor since they had blocked the day for me. Ugh.
When I got home, Cornhole was sitting in a pile in my yard, just as I left it. Ugh.
This is absolutely, definitely when I should have burned it.
The Celtic Festival
A few weeks later I have Giant Cornhole booked ot be at the Austin Celtic Festival. I paid a few hundred dollars to get in, but they gave me a prime spot, right in the middle of everything and near the beer booth. Perfect!
This one I had to do myself since I couldn’t find any movers that wanted to be part of this shit show. Totally understandable.
I hired some help (this was a two day festival), booked a uhaul (ching) and made my plans.
When I arrived in the morning, the director of the event said “we were excited to have the cornhole this year. Last year we had a bouncy house but we didn’t have anything for the kids this year.”
This is when I should have burned the director of the event.
The day was a complete freaking disaster. The parents just decided Giant Cornhole and I were the kids’ babysitters and the little brats crawled all over it the whole day as I yelled at them to get off it. No one could play it without one of the dozen kids getting in the way. This went on for ten hours.
The day wasn’t without a few nice moments of people taking photos and enjoying it the right way, but even with my hired help it was exhausting. I had calendars for sale. I sold five of them. I didn’t do the calculations but I don’t think I broke even.
That evening I was very dejected, exhausted, and was dreading going back the next morning. I don’t know why I’m so reluctant to burn things.
Sunday was a little calmer but a shitshow nonetheless. Some friends showed up and I hung out with them, which made it more fun. My friends Kim and Iain came by in the evening to help me pack it up in the uhaul. I was extremely grateful.
After a frustrating return of the uhaul we went to get a beer even though I had no energy left in me.
More Events
There were a few more events that happened, none as bad as the Celtic Festival, all of them money-losers and missed opportunities to give up and burn shit.
Well, except one, maybe. I put it outside my house during the East Austin Studio Tour. I was part of the tour for my Eureka Room and thought it would be a nice “waiting room” thing people could do. That actually turned out to be a successful idea since I got some press for The Eureka Room and we had a long wait list for showings.
It was up for two weekends (four days) and I probably got the most attention for it there – no uhaul needed – than I did spending hours and a fortune and breaking my back carrying it around town.
RIP Giant Cornhole?
Originally I had planned on doing lots of event with it after EAST. But I was having trouble with merchandising the calendars and had to focus on that. It gave me the perfect reason to not followup on leads for other events. I was done.
It sat in my front yard under a blue tarp for another month or two. Eventually a friend and I took it down and I piled it in the back yard for storage with delusions of trying again next year. If there’s anything good that came from the pandemic it’s that I couldn’t do it again for a long time.
I tried selling it on craigslist but I wasn’t sure who was going to go to craigslist and type in “Giant Cornhole”. I had no takers.
The lessons learned here are enormous, so I’ll just list the highlights:
- “Wendy Easy” is not “Mike Easy”. Wendy Easy has to do with being able to see the full process of how a thing can be done. Mike Easy means it’s done in an hour.
- I hate manual labor.
- I have some wonderfully awesome friends.
- Moving things around town is HARD. I’ve learned this before selling at popup events, but a giant cornhole is a whole other level of hard.
- For a plan like this it might have been better to really detail it out and quantify in dollars and hours what things will take. I was way way off. Clearly.
- Outline the conditions that, if they happen, trigger an automatic burning of your cornhole. Else you will never burn it.
If you are interested in purchasing Giant Cornhole it can be yours for just $999. This includes bags and tarp. Delivery is not included. Wendy offers her services to paint your design on it.
If you missed Giant Cornhole, but want more things like this, check out my weird things to do in Austin list.