If you noticed Zimmerit getting really quiet after the launch of Resin Punks, it’s because we were heads down preparing for the very first Wonder Festival US at MomoCon in Atlanta. With that behind us and us in the midst of launching our first garage kits over on garagekit.club, I thought it’d be a good time to share our experience at the inaugural Wonder Festival event in North America.
Zimmerit & garagekit.club at WonFes US
When Kaiyodo and MomoCon announced their partnership last year I was a bit surprised. In recent years Wonder Festival has been branching out overseas with events in Shanghai and Bangkok, but the US is a little different and model kit culture–particularly garage kit culture–is in a very different place than it is in Asia. And in Atlanta of all places?
Admittedly, I’d never even heard of MomoCon prior to this, but quickly learned it was a big event (somewhere just short of 70k unique attendees for 2026 apparently). That said, it also made sense; the biggest events in Los Angeles and New York are already packed. MomoCon offered a big event that could catch a lot of people and it was in a city with a major airport that offered direct flights to and from Japan.
When registration opened up I hesitated because there were a lot of unknowns. Aside from the name and Kaiyodo’s backing, little had been announced about the event itself, how it would fit into MomoCon, or what they were even really trying to do. Full credit to Renzo for telling me “we gotta do this” enough that I signed up for a booth. I already had a long-simmering model project, so it was a good excuse to get that ready.
Signing up (and subsequently getting approved for a booth) meant that we needed kits to sell. A year or two earlier I had worked with superdeformer (whose work has appeared in at least a couple different Zimmerit ‘zines) on some original mecha designs and a series of random chances put me in contact with lordofskulls, who jumped in to handle the digital sculpting.
I wanted more than that, though, so in late 2025 I reached out to a sculptor who goes by the name heroicscale about working on a bigger kit that channeled the vibes of Makoto Kobayashi, Kazuhisa Kondo, and Yasushi Nirasawa. He delivered a 17-piece mecha kit that was exactly what I wanted and with a few different kits to offer alongside ‘zines (as well as the then-upcoming and very appropriate Resin Punks), I felt pretty confident we’d have a good table.
It’s worth noting that we didn’t try and obtain a one-day license. The Japanese Wonder Festival exists in large part because of these this unique license arrangement and while it would have been neat, I wanted something I could offer outside of the event and… truthfully, it didn’t really seem like they had a solid plan for getting such licenses in the US. That’s not meant to be a slight on them because the logistics of offering such a license would (and will) be immense.
Despite mentioning it in the registration process, they were cautious about promising anything and in the end I don’t believe any one day licenses were granted. To me this isn’t a deal breaker, but given how it’s such a key component of the Japanese events I expect you’ll start seeing such licenses at future Wonder Festival US events. The world of copyright enforcement in Japan is very different than the United States and while I think there’s probably a few ways they could go about it, I’m hopeful they’ll get it working next year.
Note: We’d find out after the event that they were unable to grant one event licenses for this year’s Wonder Festival and originally had not even planned to try. According to organizers they plan on getting licenses for next year’s event.
In the end we had a full ‘zine rack, two Tamago Gundan kits, a smaller Tamago Gundan two-pack in an egg carton that people loved, some stickers and the aforementioned bigger mecha kit we called the Nirasai. All of this went together smoothly and despite some last minute panic getting everything together I left for Atlanta feeling positive but unsure of how the event would turn out.
Not knowing how many people would be there and what they’d be interested in left a lot of uncertainty in our prep work so we did the best we could. Renzo, again, came in clutch with the planning process and helped make sure we had everything we needed for the booth. We both agreed having a variety of models at different price points would be the best way to cover all our bases and we were mostly right. Though, based on how things shook out at the event, I wish I had brought more of the smaller Tamago Gundan two-packs and more of the Nirasai and less of everything else.
Garage Kits in the US
After the initial push for table registrations and confirmations, messaging from Wonder Festival and MomoCon staff was sparse. While we knew that MomoCon was big, but we didn’t know what that would mean for folks in the Wonder Festival section, where we’d be, who else would be there, or much of anything else. To their credit, they’ve admitted that communication could have been better and I say this not to complain but to convey that we didn’t really know what we were getting into.
I felt a bit of relief when they shared table map and saw that the Wonder Festival section had a very prominent place in the middle of the main exhibit hall. Absolutely no complains about how they worked us into the event.
From a planning and promotional point of view, things were fine. Leading up to the event, the official Wonder Festival US Instagram account shared just about every post I asked them to and I got replies to the questions I sent staff. It seems that other vendors had some frustrations with how marketing for the event was handled but I had planned to do promo posts on the Zimmerit Instagram leading up to the event anyways, so it didn’t impact me much. Once we showed up things were easy, load in was hassle free, and we were surprised to learn the Wonder Festival section was more or less right in front of the main entrance to the exhibit hall. In my mind, that meant they wanted this to succeed.
In addition to a handful of bigger corporate booths (Kaiyodo, Kotobukiya, and AmiAmi) and some bigger creator booths (I think they offered two or three sizes of booth), the main Wonder Festival area was composed of two islands with about 15 booths each, plus some some bigger booths arranged nearby.
The smaller vendors were a mix, with a few booths selling garage kits, some designer toys, lots of designer sofubi, and a few selling pre-painted or other resin statues that didn’t need to be built or finished. In my mind, this variety will be the biggest hurdle going forward; as they’ve got to establish what kind of event it’s going to be. There’s no shortage of events for sofubi and designer toys, but are your average anime and pop culture convention attendees going to want them? By the time the weekend wrapped my sense was that creators selling product either from Japan or with a strong Japanese-inspired design sensibility did better than others but that’s just my anecdotal observation.
Weather also threw a curve ball for some folks, with a couple vendors getting their product delayed by storms. A couple booths were complete no-shows. The folks who were there though, regardless of what they were offering, were friendly and eager to chat. I wish I remembered the names of everyone I talked to but shout outs to Kate of Plum Workshop, Kyle from Cute Monster Props, Kobayashi-san of Peco Poco, Kai of Kai’s Garage Kits, and Conner of Heavy Impact Studio.
Overall the interest from convention attendees seemed high and our booth stayed busy for pretty much the entire weekend with lots of folks curious about garage kits in general or just wanting to see what it was we were offering. Broadly speaking the booths in the Wonder Festival section offered very different stuff from your typical convention dealers hall or artist alley, so I think that alone brought in curious people. I was thankful we had zines and other things to offer because I think a range of product cast a wider net and kept us busy.
Renzo’s Take
Since Renzo was there every step of the way, I asked him if he wanted to write his thoughts about the event:
Momocon and Wonder Festival was an exciting ride. As exciting as it was to be at a new convention and making our garage kit debut, it was really great getting to meet all you longtime Zimmerit readers as well as curious newcomers. Sean and I have done a lot of writing and blogging over the years, but sometimes it can be easy to feel lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the internet. Seeing all of you at the show excited about our kits and ‘zines means the world to us and we hope to do more events in the future. It was also a blast meeting some folks I had known online since the old Spaceleech tumblr days for the first time. Shout out to Ryan of Oldtype/Newtype and Roger of Garden State Kaiju.
Atlanta was also a great city to visit, despite almost getting swept away in a flash flood. I made a pilgrimage to Georgia’s High Museum of Art, which along with having an excellent collection, was also the filming location for Hannibal’s asylum in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. I should be so lucky to be locked away in an “asylum” with an Isamu Noguchi collection.
The idea of Wonder Festival coming to America was pretty intriguing and this felt like a unique opportunity. The biggest hurdle the con faces is one of culture (and protoculture if you wanna sell a Macross kit). Wonder Festival in Japan has been happening since 1985, and on top of decades of attendees and exhibitors keeping the event going, Japan is a country with a vibrant modeling culture and an abundance of resources for the hobby. America certainly has pockets of modeling and hobby fandom, we were impressed by Momocon’s mini-painting workshop in their tabletop gaming section, but we could tell both attendees and exhibitors were a little unfamiliar with the world of garage kits. We even had a few customers ask us how to go about painting and assembling these kits.
Over the years I’ve been to a number of designer toy events in the states and similar shows such as Designer Con, Five Points Fest, and Kaiju Brooklyn, and while all these events share some common traits with Japan’s Wonder Festival, they’re just not the same. A lot of the fellow exhibitors at the Wonder Festival US were the sorts you’d see at the aforementioned shows; lots of custom figures evoking Kenner’s Star Wars toys of the 70s, GI Joe, and urban vinyl. I found the enjoyment of the Wonder Festival section as both attendee and exhibitor hinged on how much of a weeb you happen to be.
Some day I hope Wonder Festival US can have the variety of kits and niche hyperfixations that the Japanese show exhibits, and we’ll be doing our part to contribute to that. The US event still has room for improvement, but I know there’s a vibrant model kit and mini-painting scene in the US, so the future of Wonder Festival US will lie in trying to bring those people together.
Primed for Next Year
Before the weekend was over Kaiyodo confirmed they’d be doing another event at next year’s MomoCon and we’ll be applying for a table again. My hope is that they’re able to bring over a stronger Japanese presence (tariffs and general political climate no doubt makes that more challenging). As much as domestic garage kit culture still needs to grow, the event itself needs some established names to draw folks in and having a bigger contingent of Japanese manufacturers in attendance (both big and small) could really help set it apart from similar events. Helping to connect American and overseas garage kit creators benefits everyone.
It’s worth mentioning that it seems like the organizers really want this thing to succeed and were serious about identifying what worked and what didn’t. Not only did we have folks dropping by the booth collecting feedback both formally and informally, but since the event MomoCon had sent out a pretty detailed feedback survey to attendees and vendors and even held a dedicated town hall Zoom call to talk about the future of the event.
For us though, we had no regrets and the weekend turned out well. Renzo and I enjoyed it, we got to meet a lot of folks in person for the first time, and a couple of our kits sold out. For folks who weren’t able to make it or missed out, we’ll be offering the Nirasai kits on garagekit.club later this week. The Tamago Gundan kits are already available.
With some of the kinks worked out and a bigger vendor offering, next year’s event could be really special. Hopefully we’ll see you there!
Huge thanks to superdeformer for the incredible Tamago Gundan designs and turning in full-color header artwork in record time. lordofskulls and heroicscale both created really nice digital files that were easy to work with and made the entire production process about as easy as it could be for a newbie like me. None of it would have happened without Renzo pushing me to do it, helping plan basically everything, and keeping me on task. Also a big thanks to Renzo’s wife Susan for helping with the booth. And a big thank you to Orange Sign Co., they printed fantastic header cards and got them to me with time to spare even though I was sending them files at the very last minute.