Planning for outdoor builds
The regional differenceWaterfront terraces, hotel lawns, courtyards, brewery yards and rooftop decks all show up constantly in San Diego briefs. They are lovely to work and they impose four requirements that indoor builds do not.
Shade over the press area. A crew working presses in direct afternoon sun is slower and less comfortable, and the working area gets unpleasant for guests standing at the counter. Tenting is a cheap line item and it belongs on the site plan from the first draft.
Power that is actually planned. Outdoor spaces rarely have circuits where you want them. That means either a generator or a proper distribution run, and either way it needs to be on the plan and in the budget rather than discovered on the morning.
Matting for cable runs. Any cable crossing a guest route gets matted. This is a safety requirement, not a nicety, and venues will enforce it whether or not you budgeted for it.
A weather contingency. Marine layer, wind and the occasional shower are all real. Wind in particular is the one people forget: light signage and stacked garments both move. Decide in advance whether the plan is to tent, to relocate, or to pause.
Indoor San Diego
Convention & hotelThe waterfront convention and hotel cluster behaves like any major exhibition environment: advance power orders, defined load-in windows, freight-handling rules and strict aisle discipline.
Two things are worth doing early. First, get the circuit requirement onto the electrical order at the deadline rather than after it — on-site additions at convention venues cost multiples of the advance price, and that difference lands on your budget, not ours. Second, send us the exhibitor manual. Our load-in plan is built to work inside a venue's rules; it is much cheaper to read them in advance than to negotiate with a steward at seven in the morning.
For hotel ballroom evenings, the considerations are the ones common to any carpeted room with live audio: site away from the speaker stacks, plan a quiet period during remarks, and give the crew lead your stage manager's cue.
Same crew, same day
How it runsSan Diego builds are run by the same Orange County crew that works everything else, travelling down for the day. That has one practical consequence worth knowing: for very early load-ins we schedule departure with real slack, and for very late teardowns we confirm the venue's clear-by time during scoping so the last-ticket call is timed to make it without rushing guests.
Everything else is identical to a local build. Two to four press lanes depending on your window and take rate, tablet intake with a ticketed queue distributed by least-pending-work, adult XS–3XL sizing with per-size caps, the roughly nine-character practical limit on names, one to three digits on numbers, and full-colour transfers pressed onto whatever polyester your jerseys are cut from. Client-supplied garments are welcome and are usually the cheapest route.