Wood Shows Grow Together

Like most every other trade-show organizer, the Assn. of Woodworking & Furnishings Suppliers hopes to give its exhibition a boost by branching out into new market segments.

The association has struck a deal with VNU Expositions to put VNU's fledgling Wood Industry Forum under the same roof as AWFSFair, scheduled next July 18–21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The news was the latest in a string of announcements indicating the biennial AWFSFair is continuing the momentum gained when it moved from Anaheim to Las Vegas last year, leading to 19-percent growth in the exhibition.

Angelo Gangone, AWFS vice president of tradeshows, said adding the Wood Industry Forum to AWFSFair fits with the association's strategy of expanding the show so that it serves a broader spectrum of the wood industry.

The Wood Industry Forum is a high-level management conference (including a small expo) for primary wood processing; in other words, logging and saw mills. AWFSFair, meanwhile, caters to the secondary processing market — taking the raw material and making things like chairs and doors out of it. The last phase of the process is the finished goods.

"The whole idea," Gangone said, "is that you'll be able to see primary, secondary and finished goods in one location, as well as suppliers like hardware manufacturers. We'll have every element in our industry under one roof. That's nice, and we hope to grow that."

Still, he added, he doesn't expect the joined Wood Industry Forum and AWFSFair to supplant VNU's larger primary processing event, the Wood Technology Show & Clinic, which takes place every other March in Portland, Ore. — or any of the established events for that segment of the market.

Cory Smith, director of VNU's group of building shows, would not comment on the deal to put the Wood Industry Forum and AWFSFair together, explaining that the two organizations were still hammering out the details.

Smith said that the Wood Industry Forum, launched in 2005 in Seattle, was meant to be an odd-year biennial show, switching off with the Wood Technology Show, which recently moved to an even-year biennial rotation "to react to changes within the industry."

If the Wood Industry Forum-AWFSFair union does take place in 2007, Las Vegas essentially would replace Seattle in the forum's Seattle-Portland rotation for that year.

The inaugural Wood Industry Forum drew about 500 attendees and 55 exhibitors occupying close to 10,000 net square feet. Last year's AWFSFair filled 411,525 net sq. ft. with 898 exhibitors and drew 19,842 professional attendees. In addition to its near-20-percent growth in exhibits, the show saw a 12-percent increase in attendance (not including exhibitors).

AWFSFair appears to be continuing on its roll. Gangone said that at press time — a year from show opening — the exhibit space sold had already surpassed that of the entire '05 show. The association is holding nearly 1 million gross sq. ft. of the LVCC, far more than it had last year, when the show collocated with the World Market Center's Las Vegas Market and had only the South Hall.

Gangone said AWFSFair would not collocate with the World Market Center's home furnishings show again next year.

As for whether the woodworking market could produce enough attendees to fill the larger exhibition, Gangone said, "The density question's a good one. We're going to be even more aggressive in our marketing and advertising to bring as many people as we can."

Before the 2005 show, AWFS hired San Diego-based Marketing Design Group, an agency that specializes in tradeshow marketing, a move that, in Gangone's estimation, was largely responsible for the show's higher profile.

One other change: this summer former AWFS show director Nith Sisombath left the group and joined the World Market Center's temporaries management team. In Sisombath's place, AWFS hired former World Shoe Assn. exhibition manager Marguerite Gervais-Hoffman as tradeshow operations director.

Gangone said the fact that Gervais-Hoffman had worked with an association that produces a major exhibition was a big plus. "Associations don't have huge staffs, so a lot of people end up doing a lot of different things," he said.