Stallholder Clarification
Our stallholder application form is HERE with more information available on our stalls page HERE. You can reach our Stalls Lead directly via email: stalls@ukponycon.co.uk and our Stalls Lead will do their best to respond to you as soon as possible. However due to a large influx of emails, we cannot give you an estimate on when to receive a response. We very much appreciate your patience at this time.
Since opening for stallholder applications last night, we have received a lot of questions and queries and we would like to take some time to go through some frequently asked questions and provide some clarity. In the interests of being transparent, we will always share with attendees what information we are able to. However there are some details we are unable to share publicly due to contractual obligations. We apologise that it has taken some time to get this response to you, however everybody on the UK PonyCon team from our chairs, directors, heads of departments, all committee and volunteers are unpaid and doing this voluntarily between our other commitments.
We’ve created a bullet point list for each query, so that it is hopefully easy to jump to the section that is relevant to you:
Personal Assistants (Carers tickets) & Stallholder Helpers: We have information on our stallholders application form, which has caused some confusion regarding Stallholder Helper tickets and Personal Assistant tickets. More information regarding personal assistants tickets more generally can be found on our page HERE (Please note, this page is in the process of being updated and contains information relating to 2024 / our Nottingham venue. Please be rest assured this is a top priority for our team. However the information relating to personal assistants is consistent with 2025!) As a UK PonyCon stallholder you are entitled to a stallholder ticket for yourself, and you can optionally purchase one additional ‘stallholder helper’ ticket. Each table has two chairs behind it (and only space for two chairs behind it), so a stallholder and up to one helper can be behind a stall. However, some stallholders require a personal assistant (carer) to attend UK PonyCon. We believe that potential stallholders may have mis-interpreted the information on our stallholder application form and instead believed that we didn’t allow stallholders to have personal assistants (carers). This is not the case and we would like to take the time to apologize for any confusion. Accessibility is incredibly important to us here at UK PonyCon. Many of our team have our own access needs and many of us are also stallholders ourselves. To clarify:
You can have up to two people behind a table at one time. This is including the stallholder themselves. For the attendee sat with you, you can choose whether you would like to buy a stallholder helper ticket or request a personal assistant ticket (if those of you who require a carer to accompany you to attend to UK PonyCon. You may have heard a personal assistant ticket referred to as a carers ticket at other events. It is for those who would find attending the convention extremely difficult if not impossible without a personal assistant. Personal assistants can be applied for by any ticket type, and is not exclusive to stallholders.) . Having the same attendee apply for both passes, is not necessary, as both would grant that attendee access to attend the convention. It would be like a standard attendee purchasing two admission tickets for the same person. Personal assistant tickets are not marked or designed any differently to a standard admission ticket. It is merely a complimentary pass for those who require care and assistance from someone else to be able to attend UK PonyCon. You may purchase a stallholder helper ticket for one person, and apply for a personal assistant ticket for one other person. However you would only be permitted to have one behind your stall at a time. You can of course change out who is behind your stall during the convention. Between your stallholder helper and your personal assistant. Taking turns is completely okay. The information in our stallholder application form was to mitigate people applying for two attendance tickets for the same person, as it’s not necessary. As well as making it clear, that you only have the space and chairs for two people behind a stall. If you require additional helpers so that helpers can take turns to sit behind your stall with you, outside of a personal assistant? You can rotate out who sits behind your table with you. However they would need to purchase a standard admission ticket. You can’t purchase two helper tickets. We should also add that stallholder, stallholder helper and personal assistant (carer) tickets grant full access to the convention, and many stallholders used this entitlement to enjoy the events and social spaces Saturday evening of UK PonyCon 2024, after stalls closed.
If you have further questions, queries or concerns regarding accessibility at UK PonyCon? Please do reach out to our team via email: accessibility@ukponycon.co.uk
Venue Change: To be open and honest with not just our stallholders, but also all of our attendees, leaving Nottingham Trent University as our home venue was not our choice. Nottingham Trent University (NTU) could not host us in 2025 during the dates that we usually run UK PonyCon. Alternative dates that NTU offered us clashed with other UK based conventions, including other My Little Pony conventions here in the United Kingdom. As such, we were forced to secure a new venue for 2025. Securing a new venue is extremely difficult. There’s a tremendous amount of factors that go into choosing a venue that an average attendee would not even think to consider. One of the reasons we are later announcing our dates and location for 2025 was that we we’re spending a great deal of time and energy contacting venues, and seeing which spaces would be able to accommodate our needs. We have also had a great deal of pressure from within the community to move venues each year, which is more in keeping with UK PonyCon tradition to move around the country. Our new venue (the Birmingham Conference and Events Centre) Is in a prime location. Directly in the heart of the city, with unrivalled public transportation links. It’s far more accessible than our previous venue and unlike NTU, offers on-site accommodation. Our move to Birmingham has allowed attendees who wouldn’t have been able to attend UK PonyCon to join us, which was always the purpose of UK PonyCon moving around the country in the past. We are thankful to have secured a venue because the reality we were facing was there could have been no UK PonyCon 2025 at all.
The Birmingham Conference and Events Centre (BCEC) was chosen for many factors, and we know many attendees are thrilled to be at a convention venue with far better accommodation options nearby, at more affordable prices. The huge amount of food and drink establishments surrounding the venue on all sides. The venue’s availability to add an extra evening of music performances and extend the length of the convention fun. The venue also offers both a large mane stage area as well as plentiful events rooms so that we can bring you what you would expect from a UK PonyCon convention. The venue has better air circulation systems compared to NTU, where some spaces became hot and stuffy. Having a large car park adjacent to the convention venue means stallholders and attendees can drive very close the venue, and do not need to move their car after unloading or arriving. A small foldable trolley is handy to have around the home, and easily brought in a car alongside stock to assist with moving stock from the car park to the venue. Birmingham City Council will not waive enforcement of the double yellow lines due to the proximity of car parks. With all costs considered, holding UK PonyCon at BCEC costs more than it did at NTU, so ticket prices have had to increase. But perhaps most importantly, the BCEC had availability when we needed to run UK PonyCon.
We were at NTU for multiple years and it was the one time in its 20+ year history that UK PonyCon stayed in one place. We have not ruled out the possibility of returning to NTU in the future if they become able to accommodate us again and we would like to thank NTU and all of the staff at NTU for hosting us for years. For many, it felt like UK PonyCon’s home, so change was always going to be divisive to our attendees, But BCEC was our best option in the circumstances!
Single Tables only: We are only offering 1.8m / 6ft single tables for UK PonyCon 2025. Yesterday we quoted the size as 1.5m, however the tables are in fact 1.8m long and we are glad to correct this. Tables will have approximately 80cm to 120cm of space behind them (for chairs / bags / access) and gaps of approximately between 50cm to 60cm between adjacent tables for access. We can also clarify that We are aware this is disappointing for many potential stallholders, especially those who bring a large amount of collectibles to sell at the convention and are used to having a double table set up to display as much variety of stock as possible. Potential stallholders have expressed to us that they do not understand why we are only offering single tables at our new venue. The truth of the matter is that we simply don’t have the same amount of space for stalls that we have enjoyed at UK PonyCon previously. Under our current plans, our available floor area to host stalls in is 76% smaller than we had at NTU. We are offering 64% fewer tables than in 2024 when we were in Nottingham. However our table density is up 53%, which we have done to try to maximize as much of the available space as possible to safely host as many stalls as we can. We have been working hard on floor plans to try to work out the best possible solutions and layout, to mitigate the fact that we have to accept fewer stalls this year. It is one of the reasons why stallholder applications have opened later than usual; we have been trying out many different options to increase the amount of stallholders we can host and try to work out if we could reasonably offer double tables. We considered putting some stalls in a separate area of the building, to increase the number of stalls available, however believed this would be unacceptable to most stallholders. We have also moved tables designed to promote other UK My Little Pony conventions as well as UK PonyCon’s own tables out of this stalls area. We are offering Saturday-only and Sunday-only stalls to further maximise the overall number of stallholders selling at UK PonyCon 2025. We considered offering half tables, but concluded the demand for 0.9m of table would simply not be sufficient to make any meaningful difference to the overall demand-supply problem. Truthfully, even with only offering single tables, we have already received more applications for stalls than we have available at our venue. Over half the applications received so far are from people who had a stall at UK PonyCon 2024, and we’ve received many applications from people proposing to sell vintage toys (G1 to G3) at UK PonyCon 2025. We know that demand is going to be high for UK PonyCon stalls this year, and potentially halving the number of stalls we can offer by offering double tables would exacerbate the situation further. While some stallholders may still find our single stalls only policy to be unfair, we believe that maximising the number of unique stallholders is the more fair option when offering significantly fewer tables this year overall. Due to our policy of balancing different types of stalls to best satisfy the wide variety of attendees who come to UK PonyCon who are all shopping for different generations and different items, if we offered double tables, this could have meant that the number of stalls offered to stallholders selling G1 to G3 toys could have been approaching single digits. Here at UK PonyCon we have been in a catch 22, because we believe this decision would have been extremely unpopular as well, however it is one of many options we have already explored.
We understand that, this decision as well as simply having less table availability overall may mean that some stalls who usually frequent UK PonyCon may not be able to join us this year, and that is unfortunate. We understand that for many attendees, shopping and appreciating the stalls is a big part of the UK PonyCon experience and a big part of our history as a convention. However, our alternatives were to: not host UK PonyCon this year at all because we wouldn’t have the same size of stalls area, or to allow double tables and exclude a huge amount of stalls who have been with UK PonyCon for years. Here at UK PonyCon we tried to make the best and most fair decisions possible, for every single attendee, including our stallholders. We do very much hope that if a stallholder cannot join us for 2025, that we can welcome you back to UK PonyCon in the future!
And just a quick note from our team here at UK PonyCon. We understand that our stallholders are passionate people who care deeply about this community and UK PonyCon. So are we! The UK PonyCon Committee is in this community as well. Many of us are your fellow collectors and stallholders ourselves and have been with the convention just as long. We are attendees who cared so deeply about the convention that we have given up our time, for free, to help make an incredible weekend for everyone. We truly do have the best interests at heart of every single attendee and we always do our best to create the best convention experience possible. We understand that potential stallholders may have been unaware of the context of our decisions or confused over certain things and we hope this blog post can help to shed some light on what happens behind the scenes here at UK PonyCon.
With that being said. UK PonyCon has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or bullying towards our committee team, our volunteers or any attendee of UK PonyCon. We truly do keep “Friendship Is Magic” as a core thought when running UK PonyCon. In fact, our Mission Statement is public on our website HERE. We are a community brought together by a collective love and appreciation of My Little Pony. We are all here to have a fun time at UK PonyCon and that goes for the people running it as well. We have received reports of potential stallholders taking it upon themselves to contact our venue directly to enquire about booking their own meeting room. This is behaviour that could potentially lead to us losing a venue for UK PonyCon. We want to keep good relations with The Birmingham Conference and Events Centre and this sort of behaviour could put that in jeopardy. We would ask everyone that if you have an issue, to please contact our UK PonyCon team directly. Our contact page can be found HERE with a directory for each department within UK PonyCon. These emails are often managed by a single member of that department and in fact, all UK PonyCon social media, email newsletters and blogs are ran by one person. We are a small team who is doing our upmost to work with you to bring you our community event in October, but we also need potential stallholders to please be careful and to raise concerns with us directly.
