Announcing Capital Fur Con 2027

ANNOUNCING CAPITAL FUR CON 2027

To our future attendees and the furry community,

Good morning from Washington D.C. and the greater Washington D.C. metropolitan area! I’m McChaffee, the director of Capital Fur Con (CFC), and I’ve prepared this blog post to give everyone a rundown of our first convention event and plans for 2027 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

As a new convention, there’s still a great deal of planning ahead, but we’re comfortable with our current plans and ready to answer several questions we’ve been asked over the past few months. We hope that this will help build hype and enthusiasm for our convention! We eagerly look forward to the community joining us on February 25th, 2027!

The Plans

Running a new convention is difficult! Thankfully, we took a great deal of precaution with this event and planned to begin organizing it over a year out. We actually had our first official in-person majority board meeting in the Hyatt’s lobby at Megaplex where we officially agreed to go ahead with this convention and file our paperwork.

Over the months since that meeting, we’ve established the core of our plans for this convention, the key things to note are as follows:

We are a non-profit 501(c)3 charity 21+ convention. We recognise that a great deal of attendance at furry conventions typically skews towards mid-late 20s and plan to directly cater to this crowd. Additionally, we want to foster a fun atmosphere that will make event hosts and the hotel(s) comfortable by confirming that our attendees are of the age to drink.

We’re keeping our first year simple! One of the difficult things about running a first year convention is that there is no data available for us to rely on! For this reason, our internal planning process is focusing on running a modest event. We won’t have the flashiest first convention ever, but we’ll have a well organized one. At this time we can confirm that we will have the following:
1. Dealer’s Den, Adult Dealer’s Den, Artist Alley and Events Hall
2. Main Stage (w/ Raves and Events!)
3. Panels and Community Meetups
4. Gaming Lounge
5. Charity Auction
6. Suit Lounge

We are working with the Gaylord to have a functional event block. Thankfully, the Gaylord has a great deal of experience with social event functions from hosting MAGfest and Katsucon, so they’re familiar with conventions of this nature. We’re going to be sorting out the details of how to opt-in for these rooms next month via our registration setup through ConCat. Please keep an eye out for a future post regarding this!

The Vendor Halls

We’ve had our vendor team fully go over the space and are now ready to post the early official plans. Please see our early mock-up (table positions, amount of tables and booths are subject to change as needed):

The specifics are as follows:

We’re going to provide space for around 60 Dealer’s Den vendors maximum in order to avoid vendor over saturation, provide plenty of space and keep the overall vibe comfy.
We’re going to provide space for between 10-20 Artist Alley vendors depending on demand. Additionally, these slots will have a change-over period halfway through each day.
We’re going to provide space for around 15 Adult Dealer’s Den vendors maximum in order to avoid over saturation, provide plenty of space and keep the overall vibe comfy.

The numbers and layout for the Dealer’s Den are subject to change if there are lower/higher demands for booths and double table setups.

The Event Hall

CFC is officially going to have an event hall for other partnered events. These could be for other conventions, related non-profit organizations or local community events. Additionally, we are planning to have our merch store in this section to boost traffic for these tables. Tables will be offered in this hall via a table swap partnership agreement or via application. Additionally, we will allow the tables in this hall to sell merchandise related to their events.

It should be noted that tables in this hall will be FREE for recognized non-profit organizations. We will also provide attendance badges for non profit organizations and events who agree to a table swap partnership.

At this time, we have one planned table swap event in this hall:

Furry Weekend Atlanta (FWA) has graciously offered us a table at their event. We will be providing a table to them at CFC in return. We hope they enjoy CFC! Additionally, we look forward to discussing more about our FWA table in future posts!

The Room Block

Going back to our plans, there’s a good amount for us to discuss regarding our room block. Going into year one, we’re being careful with how many rooms we’re looking to reserve so as to not over-estimate our attendance. For this reason, we’ve opted for a smaller initial room block of 300 rooms, including 20 suites.

Thankfully, in the event that we fill our room block, the Gaylord will make it easier for us to expand and offer more rooms as needed. Additionally, in the unlikely event that we run out of rooms at the Gaylord, there are plenty of secondary options available.

We would like to provide some additional information regarding our room block here:

We’re looking to have about 180 Queen Rooms and 80 King Rooms.
The provided suites for this event are the Gaylord’s executive suites.
Some rooms in our block are being set aside for our convention staff currently, hence the provided numbers appear short.
We’ll likely be opening the room block to the general attendance and sponsor tiers in June. Super sponsor and higher tiers will have early access.

Suites will be offered via two systems:

Half of our suites will be offered randomly via an opt-in lottery. You must be registered to attend CFC to enter this lottery. This will occur prior to the room block opening.
The other half of our suites will be offered via an application system. We want to provide these suites to attendees looking to host room events. This will occur prior to the room block opening.

We will not be offering any atrium rooms in our block at this time due to our inability to secure a good rate (due to our smaller initial room block size), but attendees may choose to upgrade to an atrium if they like at the hotel’s rate and availability. If we can secure atrium rooms at a better rate if we expand, we will provide notice and upgrade opportunities.

Pricing:

At this time, our prices are $259 for regular rooms and $410 for suites.
Rooms and suites both incur a daily $27 resort fee charge.

Resort Fee Benefits

Two welcome glasses of beer, wine, or a cocktail at any of the resort’s bars!
Two bottles of Aquafina water per room per day!
Daily transportation on the National Harbor Circulator Bus!
Pool access!
24/7 fitness center access!
And a few more smaller benefits listed on our website here: https://www.capitalfurcon.org/hotel

Answering Some Questions

I’d like to take some time to address a few questions that we’ve been asked regarding this convention and hopefully clear up any confusion:

How/Why did you book the Gaylord? Isn’t that expensive?

Answer: So without really diving into discussing our contract details, the Gaylord was quite enthusiastic about another potential large social convention and offered us a great rate when we approached them. Additionally, there’s a good deal of community overlap between us and MAGfest, so they’re already quite familiar with the furry community. With us being reasonable with our first year budget, we don’t expect any major financial issues and will be taking responsible steps to prevent any issues.

Regarding why we picked the Gaylord, there’s a few reasons. The National Harbor is a great area for a convention (plenty of food and entertainment options), the venue itself is fantastic with a ton of room to grow (we could grow into a major con without moving), and D.C. is an ideal location both for travel accessibility and its cultural tourism opportunities.

Are you aware that you share a similar name/acronym with a rather infamous furry convention?

Answer: Yes, though at the time we filed and picked our name, we were actually unaware that convention ever existed. Just to confirm, we do not have any shared staff with Capital City Fur Con at this time. Overall as long as we run a fun convention, we’re confident a good reputation will make that a non-issue.

You mentioned scaling with regards to the room block, what about the convention itself?

Answer: In the event that there is a massive community turn-out in pre-reg prior to October, we’re looking at the possibility of securing another ballroom for our main stage. Currently the convention itself is able to function well around 2.4k maximum attendees between all of our event space, which is above our internal attendee goals. However, we are able to scale and adjust if our goals are blown out of the water. We have contingency plans in place if this occurs.

As a convention director, you’re new and don’t have much experience with directing a con. How are you addressing this? Additionally, what's your staff’s general level of experience?

Answer: This is completely true. In-fact, I fully expect that we’ll make some mistakes along the way to and during our first year convention. One thing I am personally doing as the director is surrounding myself with smart, capable staff and giving them plenty of veto power in the event that I made a bad recommendation as well as giving them a great deal of freedom with planning the aspects of the event that they are being placed in charge of.

That being said, as someone who attends conventions as an attendee several times a year, I do recognize several failings most cons have (elevator/line con) and will be doing my best to try and minimize long standing convention issues at CFC as I will be directly running our operations and logistics. In the event that any logistics are bad, please rightfully bash me on social media.

Regarding our other staff, there’s actually a wide variety of experience on the team with both new players and long-time veterans. Additionally, we have a few consultants and contacts from other conventions who are giving us valuable insight to making this convention a success.

Closing Remarks

Thank you for taking the time to read through this massive wall of text! Obviously there’s more information that needs to be discussed like our main stage, partnered charity and convention events, but for now those are still in the early planning stages. We plan to release more information as we move forward with our convention planning. Specifically, we will have more information in the coming month with regards to registration!

Additionally, we will be launching a VRC group called Capital Fur Club on VRC where you can meet and discuss events with our public relations staff. Alternatively, if the community has any questions feel free to reach out to us on our website’s contact page: https://www.capitalfurcon.org/contact-us or snipe me for conversation if you see me at an event!

We look forward to seeing you at CFC 2027!

Sincerely,
McChaffee & CFC’s PR Team