Fun and friends at the SoCal Social

A few weeks ago, my friend Bev at Flamingo Toes and I hosted the second annual SoCal Social.

It’s a really fun get together for bloggers in the Southern California area.  It’s not a conference or a seminar… it’s just a chance to meet other, like minded bloggers and hang out together.  It’s a lot of work to pull it together, but we think it’s worth it.

It helps that Bev is an absolute dream to work with.  I double puffy heart LOVE her!

We worked for months, lining up sponsors, collecting items to giveaway for swag and working with some fabulous shop owners in the Orange Circle in the downtown historic section of Orange, California to create The Swag Walk.  Our attendees show up for the event and they are given an empty tote bag and a map of stores that have special swag items for them.  It’s like Trick-or-Treating, but for grown-ups.

And I just need to point out that the adorable luggage tag/name tags were handmade by Bev…

If you haven’t been to the Orange Circle, I highly recommend you go for a visit.  It’s full of vintage shops, antique stores, boutiques and stores full of one of a kind treasure.  Oh, and fantastic food and restaurants.

The shops on our tour were all fabulous.  Click HERE to see our attendees’ wrap-ups and hear about their favorite shops.  After about 4 hours of shopping (you really need that much time… there is SO much to see and do) we all met up at Avila’s El Ranchito for more swag and a yummy Mexican food dinner.
(And in my case, a well-deserved Mojito.)

We had more swag on the chairs and the tables.

I cannot say enough great things about Avila’s.  They handled a room full of about 60 people with ease.  They were on top of everything and the service was amazing .  If you’re in the area and need a venue for any type of event, I highly recommend them.

After dinner we had some amazing giveaways, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors.

Just a  couple of our winners:  Jaime from Polka Dots On Parade won great craft kits from RoseArt and Emmy from Emmy Mom won a gift certificate to Complexions Day Spa

We even were fortunate enough that the (sold out!) SNAP Conference donated a ticket to give away to one of our attendees.  (If you are wanting to go to a blogging conference, you will not go wrong with SNAP!)  These tickets sold out withing hours of going on sale.  Needless to say, our winner was thrilled.

Congrats to Lauren from Pink On the Cheek! Best. Winner. Reaction. Ever.

All of our fabulous sponsors were more than generous!

And then, after more swag and giveaways, we were fortunate enough to hear the fabulous Mark Montano speak and receive an advance copy of his latest book, The Big-Ass Book of Bling (which he was kind enough to sign for us too!)  This book is fantastic, and I’ll be telling you more about it in the next few days.

It was a really awesome day!  (You can see more photos from lots of the attendees by searching #socalsocial on Instagram.)

For some of us though, there was one more day of fun… at Complexions Day Spa.

We hung out in a lovely cabana, had a yummy lunch and had some aahhhh-mazing spa treatments.  (My beautiful mom also joined us for a few hours.)

Organizing something like this is quite an undertaking, but Bev and I enjoy the end result so much! We thought it was worth it and think that everyone had a good time.
And in the end, that was the point!