Trade show news

Why the OutDoor Show is growing

While trade shows worldwide are attracting fewer visitors, the Outdoor Europe show held once a year in the holiday town of Friedrichshafen, is growing rapidly. This year 18 920* visitors — 12% more than last year — flocked to towns along the Bodensee to see what Europe’s top 100 outdoor companies are introducing to the trade.

Why is this show so successful?

There are two major reasons,” says Stefan Reizinger, OutDoor Project Manager for show organisers Messe Friedrichshafen. “The European Outdoor Group (EOG) decided to continue with the show in Friedrichshafen till 2013 and that sent a clear message that the industry is behind the show and that they have confidence in its future. There has been a lot of interest in the show and we have more media people here than ever before (841 journalists).

“A second reason is that since the ispo Summer show had been cancelled, this is the only platform for summer outdoor sports in Europe.”

While some sports may have problems attracting participants, the outdoors has become a daily lifestyle (see Fashion with Function).

Over the past five years the OutDoor show changed a lot, says Reizinger. “In the beginning it catered more for the extreme outdoor adventurers and mountaineers. It now appeals to a much wider audience with much more emphasis on clothes worn in daily life, rather than for climbing. You need about 2% technical performance to maintain the image as a high performance brand, the rest is everyday clothing.”

Besides, Friedrichshafen offers much more than a normal trade show — the whole lake area (Lake Constance bordering Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Itlay) is geared to cater for holidaymakers who flock to Medieval towns like Lindau and travel along the picturesque train or ferry route to the showgrounds, or make use of free shuttle services provided by the organisers.

What started for the outdoor industry as a little side show to ispo fifteen years ago, has become the annual meeting and partying place of not only the European outdoor industry, but also from all outposts. “I cannot believe it, wherever I turn, I run into a South African!” exclaimed a New Zealand visitor to the show.

About 65% of the visitors are from outside Germany, says Reizinger — although about half of the visitors are German speaking (from neighbouring countries like Austria and Switzerland). “There are many visitors from Asia and America too,” he says.

Planes from Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Graz and Vienna now land at Friedrichshafen Airport, while Zurich Airport has excellent transport connections with the Friedrichshafen exhibition centre. This year direct flights to the airport in Memmingen — 45 minutes from Friedrichshafen — were introduced. There is a free shuttle bus service from all three airports, bringing visitors directly by bus to the exhibition centre.

There is currently no point in launching an initiative similar to ispo’s “Brand New” concept that offers smaller companies an opportunity to showcase products at Friedrichshafen, as there is such a high demand for exhibition space from existing companies, he adds (787 exhibitors from 40 countries were housed in an expanded exhibition area of 75 000m²). ”This year there were fifty more exhibitors than last year.” They are in the process of building two more halls to add to the twelve existing large exhibition halls at the showgrounds.

To give an indication of the size of the Friedrichshafen show: the exhibitors were housed in ten halls, each as big as the Good Hope Centre, with a tent city in another hall and fashion shows and award ceremonies held in the twelfth hall.

This year the major theme of the show was sustainability — see Sustainability 1: Meet your new customer: Older, richer and more aware of the environment — and the lecture series emphasised the need to cut down on travel and use products longer before discarding. Surely a trade show of this nature contradicts these objectives – people from across the globe flying in to see new trends and products that will inevitably lead to others becoming obsolete?

“When we discussed the idea of having sustainability as the main theme, we were aware that we’ll be asked this question. It is true, it is not sustainable to do trade shows. But, the idea is to make sure that the topic of sustainability is given a platform so that the industry will start thinking about what challenges lie ahead in the future and what their future focus should be.”