Not All Fun and Games for TOY FAIR

By Rachelle Crum -- Tradeshow Week, 5/9/2005

As the Toy Industry Assn. ponders the future location of the winter American Intl. TOY FAIR, some longtime exhibitors are saying it's New York or nothing.

The TIA board will decide the 2007 location for the February TOY FAIR, the largest tradeshow for the play things industry in the Western Hemisphere, during ToyCon, the association's annual meeting May 20–22 in Phoenix. However, if the show were to move south to Atlanta or Orlando from New York, its home for over a century, some exhibitors say they wouldn't follow it — and might even start their own New York toy show instead.

When TIA announced April 19 that its 2-year-old showroom event, American Intl. Fall Toy Show, would remain in New York, Chairman Arnie Rubin said the decision was "in the best interests of the industry." And pressure from the 200-plus Intl. Toy Center showroom tenants within the newly formed 200 Fifth Ave. Tenants Assn. may have helped define what, exactly, TIA's "best interests" were.

Toy suppliers at 200 Fifth Ave. and 1107 Broadway (collectively known as the ITC) have demanded that the industry group keep the two shows — and consequently the industry — from leaving New York. The tenants, which will soon be ousted from their buildings (as a new owner is planning to convert them to condominiums), recently hired commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield to find them a new Manhattan headquarters.

Bob Gellman, president of 30-year ITC tenant Broadway Toys, threatened that the tenants association would create its own show in February in New York if TIA moves TOY FAIR. "There's got to be continuity," he said, and that means keeping both shows in New York. "If TIA decides to move the FAIR out of New York, we ain't going."

TIA President Tom Conley, who has noted that TOY FAIR will likely remain in New York, said comments like Gellman's "are just counterproductive. I don't think those threats serve anybody. We prefer to stay positive and stay focused on the good things."

Maria Weiskott, editor in chief of Playthings magazine (like Tradeshow Week, a Reed Business Information publication), agrees with Conley. Gellman's idea "would be a mistake," she said. "It is irresponsible for a group to splinter off."

Weiskott feels the industry should be grateful that the retailers still come to the shows since many, like Wal-Mart, "have the clout to say, 'You come to me.'"

Genna Goldberg, company spokeswoman for Malibu, Calif.-based JAKKS Pacific, an ITC tenant, said her company does not support a TOY FAIR move and would contact its customers directly rather than exhibit at a show outside of New York. "While TOY FAIR is extremely important to our industry, we would find other ways to have dialogue with (customers)," she said.

Although many TOY FAIR exhibitors desperately want the show to stay in New York — even in the dead of winter — TIA's responsibility to its members and the industry, Rubin said, is "to constantly explore the most effective and efficient venues."

Venues like Orlando's near-2.1 million square foot Orange County Convention Center and Atlanta's 1.4 million sq. ft. Georgia World Congress Center are competing for the massive show with New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which will include 1.1 million sq. ft. of exhibit space by 2009, but currently has only 814,400. TOY FAIR generates more than 30,000 hotel room-nights and makes an economic impact of $55 million, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The show (No. 55 on the 2005 Tradeshow Week 200) last occupied 330,000 net sq. ft. of the Javits Feb. 20–23.

"We've given (them) our best information that we know how to give them," said Carey Rountree, executive vice president of the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau. "This would be another great opportunity for the city" and for the GWCC, which recently lost the 2007 and 2008 versions of THE INTL. BUILDERS' SHOW/TecHOMExpo.

Ironically, the popularity of the OCCC may aid exhibitors in keeping TOY FAIR in the Big Apple. Although TIA is still considering the OCCC, Bill Peeper, president of the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau, has warned the association, "We are not sure whether we are going to have available dates in 2007."

"Boy, I wish I didn't have to have the problem," he added, but "January and February are very, very crowded" at the OCCC. And the center may become even busier, since the Natl. Assn. of Home Builders is likely to take the mid-January IBS to Orlando in 2007 and either Orlando or Las Vegas in 2008.

Peeper said that, if TIA selected Orlando for TOY FAIR, he would find a place for it in the OCCC schedule. "It's a very lucrative piece of business that we would truly, truly love to have."

Tim McGuinness, vice president of sales and convention center expansion for NYC & Co., wants to assure ITC tenants and exhibitors that the New York convention and visitors bureau is "fighting tooth and nail" for TOY FAIR.

"I've been a nervous wreck about this for the last several months," McGuinness said. "You never want to lose a long-standing, extremely good customer that has grown with the city."

Plus, the February TOY FAIR "fills a fairly large gap in the Javits calendar in a month that's normally not great weather," McGuinness said.

It is weather that Orlando-based TOY FAIR exhibitor Ron Kaplan, CEO of Action Products Intl., could do without. "You have to contend with the weather, because it's in the dead of winter," Kaplan said.

However, Andrew Stern, head of the ITC tenants association, said the New York winter weather is irrelevant to most TOY FAIR exhibitors. "There could be a tornado or a snow blizzard throughout the show, and I wouldn't know it."