GERMANY: NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL
BERLIN — The ongoing economic slump here, changing market conditions, heightened competition from other shows and scheduling conflicts are all putting the pressure on German trade show organizers.
For the majority, doing “business as usual” has become an inadequate operational strategy. Some fair producers are expanding activities abroad to insure corporate growth and support the global aspects of their domestic fairs. Others are instituting tie-ins with parallel trade events to boost attendance, and all are now actively striving to make their events more attractive to buyers and exhibitors.
The Igedo Co., which produces the mammoth and consistently strong CPD women’s wear trade show in Dusseldorf, has also had to cope with setbacks this year. Igedo, the ready-to-wear fair that gave the company its name and was once its top performer, has more or less fizzled out.
Attempts to reposition the “new Igedo” in a four-seasons time frame met with enthusiastic lip service from the industry and the German retailers association, but little actual support. In its third edition, which ran April 26 to 28, the “new Igedo” was reduced to showing in the two Dusseldorf Fashion Houses — withdrawing from the city’s fairgrounds — and as Igedo chief Manfred Kronen acknowledged, “Not all the tenants of the Fashion House were open. Buyers were very disappointed with what they could see, and I don’t blame them.”
The “new Igedo,” now scheduled for Nov. 8 to 10, may continue as a writing date, but Kronen said, “We won’t do any major marketing for this.” Corporate Fashion, which ran parallel to the “new Igedo” and featured 25 to 50 workwear producers, will now be held every two years as a fair during the A+A industrial health and safety fair in Dusseldorf starting in November 1999.
At present, no major shifts are in the offing for CPD to be held Aug. 2 to 5, boasting 2,300 exhibitors from 40 countries and attracting more than 50,000 trade visitors. But that will change when a new hall adds another 215,000 square feet of exhibition space in 2000. “We will add a lot to CPD,” Kronen said, noting more details would be disclosed in August.
In the meantime, Igedo Co. is active on a number of international fronts as producers or co-producers of Europe Selection in Hong Kong, Dessous China in Shanghai, Avenida Moda in Miami and Pure Womenswear London.
“If a show organization wants to make money, which is what we’re trying to do, then I can report we’re doing quite well in Shanghai, OK in Hong Kong, we’re still investing in Miami and we’re at break-even in London. But there’s another goal,” to Igedo’s international involvement, Kronen went on.
“We feel the European markets won’t boom any more, and we have to open other markets for our industry. We want to get to the point where a manufacturer — from anywhere — with an interest in showing — anywhere — can come to us.” Igedo’s presence in Shanghai and Hong Kong has already had a crossover effect, with Chinese manufacturers now slated to show on more than 5,000 square feet of exhibition space at the next CPD. The company wants to add more international shows, he said, “but I won’t say where, because last time, when I talked about Miami, someone else jumped in with a show.”
The Messe Frankfurt, which already produces 17 garment, home and technical textile fairs outside of Germany, is also forging ahead globally. Interstoff Asia in Hong Kong has established itself as a fairly stable biannual event. Intertextile in Shanghai had a 50 percent increase in exhibitors in 1996 and again last year and will now be split into Interstoff China and Heimtextil China.
In addition to Baltic Textile & Leather in Vilnius, Interyarn in Hong Kong, Centex (to be renamed Interstoff South America) in Brazil, and Europremiere in Como and Nice (a cooperative venture with S.I.TEX and Premiere Vision), Messe Frankfurt plans to launch Interstoff Istanbul Nov. 12 to 15, and Interstoff India in the fall of 1999.
Michael Peters, director of the Messe Frankfurt, further remarked to the press last April that he looked to perhaps do an apparel fabrics fair some day in North America and in Japan.”
“Interstoff Worldwide is going perfectly,” stated Isa Hofmann, project director of Interstoff Frankfurt. The German fabric fair, on the other hand, is still struggling with a fragmented and shrinking exhibitor base and not enough important trade visitors. At the upcoming October edition of Interstoff, Hofmann said the fair will try to bring back a clearer product group focus, including prints and workwear, rather than organizing the fair along national lines, and will work harder on incorporating producers of gray goods.
“If the offer is more challenging, we’ll get more visitors,” she said.
The most important new impetus for Interstoff Frankfurt, however, is expected to come in April 1999, with the introduction of International Textile Week Frankfurt, an event that will combine Interstoff and Techtextil, the fair for technical textiles and non-wovens, which is held every two years. The exhibitor structures of the two fairs complement each other in certain segments, the fair organization explained, and thus have several visitor target groups in common. Especially with high tech fabrics suitable for the active sportswear sector, Interstoff hopes to fill a niche not addressed by other fabric fairs. According to a Messe Frankfurt spokesman, “We have the potential to offer active sportswear makers 500 to 600 fabric exhibitors that don’t show anywhere else.”
Given that Techtextil is held every two years, Messe Frankfurt plans to explore other possible fair synergies in the years in between, possibly combining Interstoff with Texcare, the fair for care and treatment of textiles, in April 2000, for example. The fall edition of Interstoff will be held on its own.
The Cologne Messe, Germany’s other large-scale fair organization, which produces Men’s Fashion Week (Herren Mode Woche) and Interjeans — both leaders in their sectors — has no intentions of expanding abroad. “We see things differently than our other competitors,” commented Elisabeth Nurnberger, fair spokeswoman. “We want to strengthen Cologne as a show center and bring more international people here.”
Interjeans, which runs parallel to Men’s Fashion Week, is Europe’s largest jeans fair, offering about 800 companies from 40 nations. While it originated as a men’s sportswear fair, women’s jeans and clubwear collections now take up a considerable part of the show’s 750,000 square feet of exhibition space.
In the active sportswear sector, Ispo in Munich has been hit by the withdrawal of Nike as key exhibitor, which, as one industry observer noted, “could cause an avalanche.” The show has run up against tough competition from the Super Show in Atlanta, and its timing is widely considered to be much too late.
Nevertheless, in Munich show headquarters, the Ispo organizers are gearing up for Ispo ’98 Summer’s premiere in the new Munich fairgrounds. Here, Ispo’s “Universe of Sports” with its nine sports worlds and 1,500 exhibitors will take up the entire gross area of 1.5 million square feet. The new fair venue allows for a more clearly defined setup, with separate “worlds” for sport shoes and team sports, fitness, nature and outdoor sports, sports fashion and beach sports, fun sports, international sports, racket and indoor sports, kids’ sports and women’s sports.
Newer German fairs such as Contracting Leipzig — the trade show for apparel subcontracting, imports and cooperation which is going into its fifth season — or Eurotuch, the European fabric fair in Dusseldorf, are growing, albeit slowly, in Germany’s difficult market environment. And they’re retailoring their concepts and offerings as they go.
According to Heinz-Jurgen Karcisky, project director, Contracting Leipzig began as a “pure contractors’ exchange,” but since last spring also includes firms that produce private label products, a sector the fair intends to emphasize in the future. Similarly, while middle and Eastern Europe were and are the show’s main geographical focus, it also incorporates producers and contractors from the Far East, Greece, Portugal, Turkey and, for the first time this August, there will be exhibitors from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Columbia, Peru and Trinidad-Tobago.
American participation has been sporadic, and the show is currently working on a special American combined exhibitor/ visitor offer “simply to show [Americans] what one can do at the fair,” Karcisky said.
He hopes to interest 10 to 15 U.S. firms in the offer, which would include a meeting room at the fairgrounds “so [the visiting firms] can operate as exhibitors” in pursuing business opportunities.
Eurotuch — European Fabric Selection was created in 1996 and fills the closing trade show time slot in the European woven apparel fabric market, whereas Eurotuch Preview is held a month earlier. The show’s men’s wear focus has given way to an approximately 60/40 men’s/women’s wear breakdown and, in its spring edition, included 113 woven textile exhibitors from Germany, France, the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Sweden and Spain.
In 1999, Eurotuch Preview, housed in the Convention Center on the Dusseldorf fairgrounds, will overlap with the last two days of CPD, a synergy welcomed by both fairs’ organizers. Apparel manufacturers at CPD can take some time out to visit the fabric fair, said a Eurotuch spokeswoman, and as CPD chief Kronen remarked, Eurotuch is another reason for the apparel industry to come to Dusseldorf “even if they don’t show here.”