Dare Foods Bear Paws Trading Cards at Pillar and Post

Booth Empire produced a custom trading card activation for Dare Foods Limited on June 18, 2025, as part of the company’s national sales meeting at the Pillar and Post Inn & Spa in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The activation turned approximately 70 to 80 attendees into the stars of their own personalized Bear Paws sports cards, produced live on-site during the event’s “Eat Street” programming.

The Bear Paws Brief

Dare Foods used the national sales meeting to present the Bear Paws brand and to build internal momentum around an upcoming youth-sports-focused product initiative. That context shaped the brief: this was not a generic photo booth for a corporate event, it was an internal brand activation whose creative needed to reinforce the sports positioning the sales team was about to go sell.

Trading cards were the right format match. A sports-card layout lets you put an employee’s portrait into the visual language of a baseball or hockey card - the frame, the name, the branding - and it instantly reads as “this is a sports moment” without any explanation. For an internal audience being briefed on a sports-adjacent product push, the format reinforced the message every time someone looked at the card.

The activation was scoped for the venue’s Gallery room and ran as part of the broader “Eat Street” programming rather than as a standalone booth. That placement mattered: it put the trading card experience directly in the flow of the meeting rather than in a side room attendees had to find.

How the Trading Card Experience Worked

The guest workflow was built for an internal audience that would be moving through the activation in groups:

1. Prop selection. Attendees chose from a set of sports props, which gave each portrait personality and leaned into the sports-card format.
2. Portrait capture. Each guest posed for their card photo, with on-the-spot direction from the two-person Booth Empire team to keep the captures consistent and fast.
3. Personalization. Each finished card was produced with the guest’s name applied to the Bear Paws sports-card design, so every employee walked away with a card that was recognizably theirs.
4. On-site production. Cards were finished live during the activation. No post-event email chains, no waiting for a follow-up delivery, no organizer stuck managing distribution after the meeting wrapped.

The production flow is the same one Booth Empire runs for major sports-brand activations, which means the same capture quality, the same card layout discipline, and the same throughput expectations, just delivered for an internal audience instead of an external consumer event.

Built for an Internal Audience

Internal brand activations behave differently than consumer-facing ones, and the Bear Paws brief reflected that. The audience already knew the brand - they were there to be briefed on it - so the activation didn’t need to do the work of explaining Bear Paws. It needed to do something different: make the brand feel tangible and personal, and give employees a piece of collateral they would actually keep.

That’s where trading cards outperform a standard photo booth for an internal context. A photograph is a photo. A trading card is a collectible. Employees set them on desks, pin them to internal Slack channels, drop them into internal newsletters, and trade them with colleagues. The format gives the brand artifacts circulating inside the organization well past the sales meeting itself.

The youth-sports product tie-in made the format choice even sharper. When the sales team walked out of the meeting with Bear Paws sports cards featuring their own portraits, the sports positioning was reinforced through the artifact itself. The card was the message.

Activation by the Numbers

• 70-80 attendees moved through the activation across the “Eat Street” programming window
• 58 finished cards produced at maximum capacity
• ~90 minutes of active service
• Two-person Booth Empire team handling capture, production, and distribution
• Gallery room placement at the Pillar and Post Inn & Spa
• Custom Bear Paws sports-card design with personalized name on every card

Custom Trading Cards for Sales Meetings

Trading cards are one of the most effective formats for internal brand activations because the output is collectible, on-brand, and self-distributing inside the organization. Employees keep them. They show up on desks, in internal channels, in company newsletters. For a brand like Bear Paws leaning into a sports product initiative, the format reinforced the message in a way a generic photo booth could not.

Booth Empire produces custom trading card experiences for national sales meetings, brand launches, and corporate events across Canada and the United States. Every card is custom-designed around the brand’s visual identity. Tell us about your internal activation, see more Niagara activations, or browse the full case study library.