3 minutes
Date change gamble for Shanghai’s Chic, Intertextile, PH Value trade shows pays off
China's top textile/apparel trade shows, Chic, Intertextile and PH Value, took a gamble when they chose to bring their dates forward to be more in synch with the international calendar of industry buyers. It was a risky gamble, since the shows were slotted into the calendar a week after the major European industry shows, and coincided with a major holiday period in China. But the gamble paid off, and the shows, held on September 27-29, posted positive visitor figures.
Intertextile, whose autumn edition is traditionally more popular than the March one, claimed an attendance of “approximately 78,000 buyers,” from some 110 different countries. Virtually the same as the 77,883 industry professionals who attended the October 2017 session. As for Chic, 58,400 visitors attended the show held at Shanghai’s National Exhibition and Convention Center, fewer than the 65,700 visitors who came for the previous autumn edition, always the less popular of the event's two annual sessions.
The decrease was expected, given the show’s positioning on the fashion calendar, and the vacation period in China. “The number of visitors was almost the same as in previous years, despite the fact that this session was held in the middle of a major national holiday like the mid-Autumn Feast [China’s second most important national holiday - after the Chinese New Year - held on September 24],” said the organisers of Chic.
The show is now busy preparing the next March edition, and is intent on becoming a privileged gateway to China for foreign labels. Come March, Chic will in fact operate a series of Key Account Managers, who will be assisting foreign exhibitors in finding the appropriate outlets for their products. A similar kind of service was already active in September with the Chic Matching initiative, designed to forge links between brands and distributors and used by the likes of Alibaba, JD.com, Amazon, Carrefour and others.
As for Intertextile, its organiser Messe Frankfurt also emphasised the importance of the networking generated by the event. “Earlier dates were helpful in this sense, as they are more aligned with Autumn/Winter seasonal sourcing, which is now taking place earlier than before. Both exhibitors and visitors appreciated the new dates,” said the General Manager of Messe Frankfurt Hong Kong, Wendy Chen.
Messe Frankfurt, which organises Intertextile jointly with the Chinese Textile Chamber of Commerce (CCPIT-Tex), now intends to stick to these earlier dates, despite their closeness with the European trade shows. Especially with the Parisian shows Texworld and Apparel Sourcing, which had brought their dates forwards by a few days to carve out a slot for its exhibitors and visitors before the Shanghai events. It was instead confirmed that Intertextile’s winter edition will still be scheduled in March, a month which works well with the buyers’ calendar.
The next edition of Chic and Intertextile is scheduled from March 12 to 14 2019. The knitwear show PH Value and Yarn Expo, the trade show for fibres and yarns, will be held on the same dates. Because of lack of space at the National Exhibition and Convention Center, the latter event could not be held together with its habitual counterparts in September, and was instead held on October 15-17 alongside the ITMA Asia and CITME textile machinery shows.
Copyright © 2024 FashionNetwork.com All rights reserved.
