For all of Salesforce’s environmental messaging – which resulted in them deciding to deal for free – including the famous Dreamforce backpack – Dreamforce still has an abundance of company merchandise technology conference takes over the city center San Francisco this week.
By Wednesday, the second day of the mega-conference-slash-music-festival-slash-corporate summer camp, I was tired of stimulus overload and waiting in line. So I started a little game: Can I wear a free Dreamforce outfit from head to toe?
An obvious piece of wisdom: Corporate conferences and networking events are an incredible source of delight that you will wear once and then relegate to the hallowed recesses of your wardrobe. To offset the high price tag and brain drain of having to shake hands and interact with dozens of strangers a day, you get the promise of free food. It’s a Pavlovian mode of interaction: shake hands, get a reward.
Nowhere is this more evident than at Dreamforce, where the entire ground floor (or camp, as we say in Salesforce) of the Moscone Center simply oozes free st.
Among the gifts at your disposal, besides the usual boxes and water bottles: caricatures, milk frothers and countless photo ops. I bought a bottle of face wash just to stand in the audience of a game show sponsored by L’Oreal. There are also many lotteries. Among the things I spotted on Wednesday: AirPods and AirPod Maxes, Nike Jordans, a guitar signed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, drones, a Segway, and a Theragun massager. (Several cars were on display, but it was unclear if they were up for grabs.)
So I thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to be decked out in company logos from head to toe.
Some ground rules for this little experiment: no duplicates (you don’t need 10 shirts from different startups) and no bags (like a piece of blue check junk, I already have too many).
It went very well. First of all. Upon entering the camp, the TikTok booth was handing out free baseball caps. I shook his hand and took my blue hat. Then I walked in and met a nice guy from a company called Coveo – he complimented my pants, we joked, and he gave me two pairs of striped socks. So far, so good.
I got a little greedy. Some people in one booth were wearing hoodies. I wanted a hoodie, I went. A nice guy who told me about a company called LeanData said that the hoods are only for customers. (He assured me that even if he was an employee, he wouldn’t be able to afford one.) My consolation prize: a green shirt.
This was within 20 minutes. Then problems started to appear. In a sea of t-shirts, tote bags and free cups of coffee, there were no pants. No company is going to spend thousands of dollars on any kind of underwear, whether it’s nylon shorts or sweatpants. Even Salesforce didn’t sell any pants or shorts at its Dreamforce-branded “Dreamstore.”
Even Dreamstore, which sells Salesforce jumpsuits and plush dresses, didn’t have any pants.
Joshua Bote/SFGATEAs for the shoes, at least two companies offered winning sneakers. I signed one of them, courtesy of Five9. (I have not won at the time of writing.)
Besides the difficulty of dressing the bottom half, there was a more ethical problem: I was tired of being contacted in the name of buying a trade. How people can smile and network for three days straight when I can barely swing for an hour is beyond me. I felt a little bad for all the sales people, I only presented their offer to someone who was interested in the treatment they had to offer. Keeping in touch all the time, rubbing your hands raw with handshakes must be tiring. An event like this has a bigger concern: No amount of time can fill the void of sitting through sessions on how to optimize your use of enterprise software.
A TikTok hat, LeanData t-shirt, and Coveo socks were all I could muster.
Joshua Bote/SFGATEMy trading cheat days are over, for now. But if someone has a pair of pants to give me, I will (very, incredibly reluctantly) shake hands and hear your company.
