Strawberry Shortcake Convention

Hi. I’m Christina–imchristina2 to most of you–and I started the SSC Convention. It all began in the mid-late 1990s. I had graduated college, gotten married, started working as a RN but something was missing. Then one day I found a Barbie coffee table style book at Sam’s Club and as I was flipping through it, saw a lot of my old dolls from childhood. Back when I was around 10, I was told I was “too old to play with dolls anymore.” LOL! My mom did lovingly save them for me though. I bought the book at Sam’s and next visit to my mom’s house, I went searching for my old dolls. In the giant suitcase of dolls was one little, lonely Strawberry Shortcake doll.

I had always had an interest in computers and at that time eBay was fairly new. So off I went…I made a homely little website, a Yahoo! Group, and starting buying anything and everything Strawberry Shortcake! Soon the Yahoo! Group grew to be the largest Yahoo! Group dedicated to SSC. As people joined the group and introduced themselves, I noticed that a lot of us were from a localized area–OH, PA, NY, MI, KY, IL, etc and thought it’d be great if there would be some way that we could all meet up. There had been one attempt at a SSC Convention earlier that did not happen. I knew this but I thought I could do something on a smaller scale–a meet-up of sorts.

I live in a suburb of Cleveland and American Greetings world headquarters is in Cleveland, OH. So I contacted American Greetings. They didn’t want to participate in the meet-up. However they did graciously offer to donate a large basket of SSC merchandise to the event to be given away! I honestly don’t remember if I contacted Bandai or the other way around, but they were interested in joining the event! Bandai America was the new toy licensee for SSC and was about to launch their line of toys in the US. Upon hearing that a group of SSC fans was planning an event, they offered to attend the event and bring all the new SSC toys ready for release in the Fall of 2003! Even better, they would then offer the toys up to the collectors! Once American Greetings(AG) learned that Bandai was going to attend, they decided they should attend to support their new toy licensee. So now we had both Bandai and AG attending and speaking to our group!

That first year was a big learning curve for me. I had never tackled anything that big on my own before. But it was absolutely amazing! We had a great event–Nick from Twin Pines of Maine discussed VDS and their products, Diana E. Vining gave a class on drawing SSC, Jaye L. spoke on displaying a collection, we even got to visit with THE SSC, and finally presentations from both AG and Bandai! There was a lot of trading, buying, and selling the night before the event too! More on everything as this site grows but this is where SSC Convention started, with an idea and a wish to make friends who loved SSC like me…