It’s the geekiest time of the year once again. GeekCraft Expo returns to St. Louis for two weird, wonderful days, from 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at Webster University’s Grant Gymnasium (175 Edgar). Tickets are $5 and available both online and at the door.
The expo features handmade items relating to gaming, comic books, TV shows, and all manner of other geeky pursuits—all handmade, all by people who love whatever it is at least as much as you do.
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“The thing about geeks is we don’t love anything a little bit,” says GeekCraft Expo director Daniel Way. “The things we like are strange and unique. It’s a chicken/egg thing—does what we like make us weird or is it the other way around?”
GeekCraft Expo has been touring the country since 2016 and has been stopping in St. Louis since 2018. Way, a comic book writer who’s worked on Marvel Comics series such as Wolverine: Origins and Deadpool, as well as a Deadpool video game, says he founded it because he saw a need for the niche to come together.
“The idea was to put shows where there was a concentration of geeky crafters and makers and then give them a focal point, a market that was just them,” says Way. Too often, he says, there might be one or two truly geeky makers at any given craft fair or market. “The idea was to bring them all together so that they benefitted from each other.”
Why the overlapping Venn diagram between passionate geekery and craftiness? “What I see over and over again is there’s a person who is a geek about something, they have their geeky pursuits and passions, but they also have another skillset or two,” Way says. “It occurs to them at some point in their journey that they’re going to put these two together. They make something and they’re like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted.’ Someone else sees it, and they’re like ‘Where did you get that?’ Thus is born a little side hustle.”
Way’s work as a comic book writer makes him uniquely positioned to closely observe the geeky landscape. He gets invited to conventions and other events, and if there’s a good scene of fans, he crawls social media by location to choose where to bring the Geekcraft Expo.
He runs a pretty tight ship in terms of curation—he generally won’t have vendors who are in direct competition with each other, and the work has to be great. Vendors at each Geekcraft event are also local, because Way believes in the power of keeping your money in your own community. “They need to be unique and they need to have quality,” he says. “We’re looking for people that have a real passion behind what they’re doing. When attendees show up, they can’t believe what they’re seeing.”
The event is family- and kid-friendly, and Way says the events see folks from all ages and walks of life—and in all manner of outfits. “We love it when cosplayers show up,” he says. “No one’s going to appreciate your work more than other people who make things.”
