Grab Your Lanyard. Trade Shows Are Plotting a Comeback.

From the WSJ

Just a year ago, a crowd of 5,000 people wandering an Orlando, Fla.-area exhibition hall would have been considered tiny in trade-show terms. This year, it was deemed a good start.

The occasion was a joint event held last month by three apparel-industry trade shows, Womenswear in Nevada, Magic Pop-Up and Offprice, which relocated to Orlando from their usual home in Las Vegas. In early 2020, those shows drew about 55,000 total attendees. But the goal of this year’s gathering, organizers say, was to figure out how conference-going can work in a pandemic.

Masks, temperature checks and Covid-19 tests were mandatory. Booths were spaced out, aisles had no carpets and floor markings reminding attendees to keep their distance were ubiquitous. Hand sanitizers were swag mainstays. “No hugs or handshakes this year,” an event website read.

The roughly $11 billion U.S. trade-show and exhibition industry is slowly coming back to life after a largely lost year due to coronavirus. A full recovery isn’t expected for about two years, industry executives say, and many questions now face organizers and the businesses that rely on lanyard-clad masses: How quickly can shows, which require months of planning, come back on the calendar? Are attendees ready to crowd into expo halls and hotel bars with strangers again? And, after a year of remote networking, do they feel they need to?

Before the pandemic, attendees came to trade shows in part for the prospect of rubbing elbows with people they would otherwise never meet. Top, phone aficionados jostle to photograph a Nokia smartphone ahead of the Mobile World Congress in 2019. Beneath, crowds mingle near a full size model of a Hyundai flying taxi at CES 2020.

Some of the biggest shows are planning to resume in person, with options for tuning in virtually. Mobile World Congress, which hosted more than 109,000 attendees in Barcelona in 2019, will return with a hybrid option in June after scrapping the event in 2020. CES, the world’s largest tech show, went virtual this year and expects to return with a hybrid option in Las Vegas in January 2022.

In the U.S., the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently discourages large events and gatherings, citing “extremely high” cases of Covid-19 across the country. If the gathering involves attendees from outside the local area, the agency advises event staff to provide information about local Covid-19 levels so attendees could make informed decisions about their participation.

The joint gathering of apparel shows in Orlando was a “pilot” to test the effectiveness of precautionary measures at a smaller scale, said Douglas Emslie, group chief executive of Offprice organizer Tarsus Group PLC.

“This was not an event where we made any profit at all,” Mr. Emslie said. “This was an investment for the industry to prove that we can run these events.”

Eighteen attendees who took an on-site Covid-19 test outside of the exhibition hall returned a positive result, and those who did immediately left the venue, organizers said. They said they haven’t received reports of positive cases after the event.

Both attendees and organizers understood the risks of an in-person event, Mr. Emslie said.

“The intention was never to create a bubble that was there consistently for the three days,” Mr. Emslie said. “This is about risk management, and it was never going to be 100%, and we never presented it to our attendees that it was going to be 100%.”

One attendee, Steven Gasparovic for B&S Activewear LLC, said going to the trade show was a quick way for the firm to strike 15 sales in a three-day period—even if it required spraying sanitizer on every piece of fabric after a visitor touched it.

“The cost of sending out as many samples as you get to put in front of a customer is astronomical, comparatively speaking to being in a venue where they’re coming to you,” said Mr. Gasparovic, the clothing wholesaler’s director of U.S. operations. He said he felt reassured knowing that all attendees had been tested before the event. The venue didn’t feel crowded, he said, and he witnessed exhibition staff patrolling to remind attendees to properly wear their masks.

The organizers say they hope to return to Las Vegas this year. An expert group hired by a trade association for the events industry is evaluating the apparel shows’ health and safety measures for a report that it plans to submit to government officials including the Nevada governor.