Okay, WOW. I had a booth for a baby expo and really wanted to make my space "pop" in the sea of black drape that the venue was providing. After finally stumbling on the right combination of keywords for my Google search (seriously, I just needed to rent some fabric for the pipe-and-drape situation and a table skirt, this shouldn't be that hard!), I found Event Rental in Gretna. Because I needed a very specific look and the internet is notoriously flaky with color, I called them to find out A) if I could get the fabric without the pipe setup and B) if I could come look at the colors in person. "No problem, just stop by!"
That's actually a bit easier said than done. I was a little confused when I first pulled up because the warehouse is big and obvious but didn't look like where I needed to be, and the office building is on the opposite side of the street, further down, with just their logo on the glass door. I guess I should be thankful that there was absolutely no parking and I had to circle around, or I wouldn't have even seen the building that I needed. So yeah... parking? It's awful. On-street parking only, and there wasn't a spot available on the whole block both times I went. I ended up parking across 5th street and walking back over. This could most definitely use some improvement.
The rest of my experience was out of this world though. There were tons of fabric samples inside, but it looks to be geared more towards weddings and such, because there weren't any samples of the drape material in that building. I was really impressed with how much STUFF they have, though, and the variety of fabric choices is staggering. Their website is really thorough too... it looks as though they have everything that they offer listed there, which I definitely appreciate since I'm a bit of an internet-research junkie. The design person I worked with (Kenya) was super friendly, knowledgeable, and very much willing to find something that would work with my booth design (of which I only had a description and a few pics in my cell phone that the color needed to blend with). She went over to the warehouse and pulled some of the drape material while I waited, gave me a really good deal on the fabric rental, walked me back over to the warehouse once we had the contract written up to make sure everything got pulled correctly, said more than once to please call if the color didn't work when I got everything together so we could make it right, and even insisted on carrying everything to my car for me when all was said and done. While waiting in the warehouse, I had no fewer than four people ask me if I had already been helped, almost every employee that passed said hello, and they even brought out a couple of chairs for my son and I while we waited. I know these guys are probably used to dealing with event rentals that total several thousand dollars and my little rental was just peanuts, but you would never know it from the customer service that I received. I left there wanting to throw a huge extravagant party just because I wanted to put together a fun idea concept all their cool stuff.
This should really a 4.5-star rating because of the crap parking, but the customer service is like a 7, so I'll go ahead and do 5 and call it even.
And my booth looked AWESOME, by the way. :) read more