Attendance isn't all that counts
Ray Allegrezza, Editor-in-chief -- Furniture Today, February 16, 2009
Size, specifically in terms of show attendance, doesn't matter. It really hasn't for quite some time.
Even so, the issue of attendance seems to still be an obligatory topic of conversation. Invariably, I'll hear the following:
“Boy, there sure seems to be less people here this time.”
Give that guy a Kewpie doll; he won!
I was terrible at math as a kid, but even I can understand that if there are fewer buyers now than there were a few years ago, and if stores are sending smaller buying teams (and for the most part they are) guess what you end up with? You got it: Fewer buyers.
Instead of judging a show by the volume of warm or even lukewarm bodies milling about, perhaps you should start judging how well the event did for you based on your order book, or by the number of firm commitments you ended up with.
I spoke to the president of a major case goods supplier showing at last week's Vegas market. While he had a good show and wrote orders, he had one day where the showroom was busy, but when they totaled up the orders, they were lower than expected.
He called that the motion-without-movement phenomena. “Trust me,” he quipped. “If I had to pick one, I'd take movement.”
Here are the major trends I saw in Las Vegas:
• Based on the current economic reality, many buyers have become container-shy. Instead, they are seeing sources that have domestic warehouses that can ship small quantities quickly.
• Buyers shopped hard for value-driven lines. This is not to say they wanted cheap goods. Rather, they wanted products that offer a high perceived value.
• Despite the doom and gloom, a number of retailers, many of them small and medium-sized stores, reported single-digit growth that began right after Christmas and continued in January and February.
• The Internet, either as a channel of distribution or as source of information for customers, is getting more play from the retail community.
• In uncertain times, retailers are gravitating to known and trusted sources. Few buyers want to roll the dice on a new source in this environment.
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