Reed Gift Fairs a subsidiary of an American/British/Dutch ownership seems to have angered quite a few of the retailers visiting the MEC for the annual August gift and homewares fair by trying to inconvenience those that want to visit the GHA Section.
Many retailers and wholesalers in Australia are still trying to swallow the total aggravation with the fiasco caused by Reed’s ill considered takeover of gpoint.com.au and relocation and rebranding it as giftnow.com.au
The annual August Melbourne gift fair, organised by GHA (The Australian Gifts and Homewares Association) and by the foreign owned Reed Gift Fairs, has just completed.
The event is one of the largest trade events in Australia and needs two venues to cater for all of the exhibitors. Around half of the exhibits are at the Melbourne Exhibition centre and the balance at the Melbourne Show Ground.
Both organisations offer exhibition space at both venues and so, whilst they are competing for exhibitors, to save costs, they manage to share signage and co-operate on bus services to transport the retail buyers from one venue to the other. (Reed won’t do this for the Sydney event in February however because the two Sydney locations are not shared locations and they seem to believe that GHA’s retailers won’t want to see their exhibitors)
All serious retailers normally take the time to see all sections at both venues because they want to find the best of the new products for their coming retailing season. The exception might be the Reed section in the MEC which has a large portion of just jewellery and handbags, which many retailers are not interested in.
The cost to exhibit is very expensive but significantly lower (around half) if wholesalers exhibit in the GHA section (simply because the GHA is a not-for-profit organisation owned by the exhibitors).
Exhibitors continually analyze which spot is the best to be located, however the real situation is that it matters little. It matters little because both organisations provide an event catalogue that makes it easy for retailers to prepare and find the wholesalers they specifically want to visit AND because almost all retailers walk the full event and eyeball every stand. (The biggest differences a wholesaler can make, is in how well they present their stand and how well they attract customers to their stand before the event, making it a point that the retailer wants to visit and browse).
In the MEC, the GHA’s Home and Giving Fair and the Reed Gift Fair sections occupy opposite ends of the Exhibition Centre (approximately half each). However Reed requires the MEC to have a wall between its exhibitors and GHA’s.
Ordinarily this peculiarity is not much of an inconvenience to retailers as they have in the past simply walked out the last GHA door and into the first Reed door (Or vice versa). This year however the GHA publicly suggested to Reed to “Take down that wall”.
It seems Reed decided they could simply annoy GHA by making the wall worse. They responded by closing off the last two entry doors of their end, so that retailers ending on their side of the wall have to walk back 100 meters to proceed to the GHA’s section.
Of Course Retailers entering Reed from the GHA’s side had to decide whether to walk back 100 meters to the start of the Reed section or to simply continue from where they entered. So perhaps some of Reed’s Exhibitors have suffered also.
A number of GHA exhibitors in the MEC were surprised to find retailers complaining about having enough walking on trade fair days without foreigners Reed Gift Fairs deliberately making their day worse.
