Anyone in our business of making and selling home, gift and fashion knows that January can be a pretty big blur. Even before you’ve taken down the Christmas decorations and recovered from New Year’s Day football you are thrown into getting ready for January markets and all that comes with them.
That’s certainly the case with all of us at the Dallas Market Center who host back-to-back-to-back markets across all our product categories and host tens of thousands of people on our campus. With a pretty good holiday season for most retailers – especially here in Texas and the surrounding states – we all felt pretty good getting ready to start the new season.
I like to think we brought our A Game this year with a whole host of new initiatives for these January markets. I know all markets talk about how good their shows were but I have to tell you this one was outstanding for Dallas on so many levels: attendance, events, new exhibitors and even the positive energy in the buildings
Attendance was strong across the board, but we saw an acceleration of buyers visiting from the western U.S. and an uptick in first-time buyers.
On the exhibitor side, we were fortunate enough to have a nearly unprecedented number of new vendors showcasing their lines in new spaces. We cut the ribbon on dozens of new permanent showrooms and the number of temporary exhibitors across all shows was up significantly especially for Total Home & Gift Market and The Men’s Show.
For events, on the gift and home side we unveiled a new series called Speaking of Retail where independent store owners – the people who deal with the consumers every day – sat down and talked about their businesses...both the good and bad sides too.
We had three sessions, each focused on a specific topic: the rep-retailer relationship, best practices on Instagram and advice on e-commerce. We’ve always had seminars and workshops as part of our shows but these new events were really on-the-ground reports from the front lines of retailing.
I know I learned a lot and really gained some insights into the business, proving you can always learn no matter how long you’ve been doing this. Hope you got a chance to attend some of these and watch for future sessions of this new series in the markets ahead.
We did a whole lot of other interesting events and activations, from an AI-virtual reality display as part of our Lightovation show to the 34th Annual ARTS Awards which honored the best in the business of home.
When the month of January ended we all let out a big sigh of relief that things had gone well. But as anyone who does this can tell you, it didn’t last long as we had to start planning for the next round of shows.
It never ends...and that’s a good thing for all of us. See you next time.
Cindy Morris,
CEO, Dallas Market Center
