WASHINGTON — Despite the growing desire of Canadians for American-made apparel, the U.S. government said it was forced into a last-minute cancellation of what was billed as a major trade conference in Toronto due to lack of interest. The show was to be held June 11-14.
“We were shocked,” said Lawrence Brill, a senior international trade specialist with the Commerce Department’s Office of Textiles and Apparel. “We had about 500 representatives of Canadian retailers, wholesalers, agents and distributors, some coming from as far away as Vancouver, to attend our conference. But as of May 31, we had 10 U.S. companies signed up and maybe would have ended up with 15.”
A minimum of 30 exhibitors was needed to break even, Brill said. Similar events in Canada in 1990, 1991 and 1992 drew about 50 firms each. The last two were held in Toronto and the first in Montreal.
This year’s was to be the most ambitious yet to help Americans exploit a Canadian market for U.S. apparel and textiles that has nearly tripled since the advent of the 1989 Free Trade Agreement to about $2 billion last year.
Over the four days, OTEXA and KPMG Peat Marwick, the other U.S. sponsor of the event, were to offer seminars detailing the nuts and bolts of selling women’s and girl’s and men’s and boys’ apparel in Canada, as well as home furnishing textiles, linens and bath accessories. Discussions were to focus on how the North American Free Trade Agreement and the GATT Uruguay Round treaty will affect doing business in Canada.
U.S. participants were to be given time to make sales pitches to Canada’s leading retailers, such as Hudson’s Bay Co., Sears Canada and Suzie Shier. The all-inclusive charge, save for airfare, was $1,395 per person, about the same as before. While the event is not a trade show, the U.S. companies would have been provided with fixtures to display their merchandise to the retailers.
The U.S. mentioned all of this in letters and brochures it mailed earlier this year to about 6,000 firms with annual sales of $3 million and above. Nearly 24,000 letters were sent first class in the U.S., and another 7,000 to Canadian firms, said Irving Vigdor, managing consultant with Redwood Associates, North Merrick, N.Y., which helps OTEXA organize trade conferences and shows.
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“This is a mystery,” Vigdor said. “I checked all over the country and there are no conflicts, just a small contract furniture show in North Carolina.”
“We’re scratching our heads like everyone else,” said Jeffrey Sands, Peat Marwick’s national director, apparel practice, New York. “About the only thing different at all this year is that we moved the show to late spring from fall, figuring this would help companies capture fall season sales better.”
While conceding that Mexico “has been getting a lot of attention lately,” thanks to NAFTA, Sands said, “We’ve not detected any falling off of interest in Canada.”
Meanwhile, the U.S., which has spent about $20,000 so far on the project, only to cancel, hasn’t given up on Canada either. Vigdor said the conference might be rescheduled for late fall or early in 1995.