Scrapbookers Stick With CHA

ANAHEIM—After MemoryTrends Trade Show drew only nine exhibitors to its collocation with the Photo Marketing Assn. Intl. Convention & Trade Show Jan. 31-Feb. 2 in Las Vegas, one could guess that the scrapbooking industry was in trouble. The Craft & Hobby Assn. Winter Convention & Trade Show dispelled that idea.

At the CHA show, scrapbooking and paper crafts – one of seven specific categories the showfloor is classified by – took up more than half of Halls A, B, C and D Feb. 10-13 at the Anaheim Convention Center.

“It's no question that scrapbooking (and paper crafts) is the hottest section of the show,” said Tony Lee, vice president of meetings and expositions at CHA. “Scrapping keeps reinventing itself.”

The section bustled with people doing “make-it-take-it” activities at booths, wearing green T-shirts over their regular outfits in hopes of winning a Slice (the newest personal shape cutter) and waiting in lines for product demonstrations or technique lessons.

The 8-year-old MemoryTrends had been growing rapidly. It was a Tradeshow Week Fastest 50 winner in 2005 and 2006. In 2005, it filled 106,659 net square feet at the Sands Expo & Convention Center/Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and attracted 388 exhibiting firms. That was the year Primedia sold the show to Enthusiast Media. Nobody has released show statistics for it since then.

At the 2006 show, participants told TSW they thought foot traffic had slowed.

Last summer, the much larger PMA struck a deal with MemoryTrends' current producer, CK Media, to collocate the two shows at the Las Vegas Convention Center – placing MemoryTrends just weeks before CHA and less than five months after it had last taken place, Sept. 18-20 at the Sands.

“We never felt there was room for three shows,” Lee said. “The market has spoken.”

Ted Fox, CEO and executive director of PMA, the Worldwide Community of Imaging Assns., said MemoryTrends has lost marketshare to CHA of the traditional crafting scrapbook customer, but the future of the PMA and MemoryTrends collocation is in new software technology that allows people to create memory books digitally.

“It opens up a huge market,” he added. Fox said it allows people who otherwise wouldn't scrapbook to make the memory books.

“I think CHA will continue to represent the craft-heavy end of the market,” he added.

Shirley Ziebarth, with Le Sueur, Minn.-based it takes two, a manufacturer of stickers, papers and rub-on transfers, said she liked the concept of MemoryTrends – scrapbooking only – but the show's dates were too close to CHA, which her company believed was the better show for it to exhibit in.

“It seems as if our customers … were dropping MemoryTrends and going to CHA,” she added. It was the first year the company didn't exhibit at MemoryTrends, Ziebarth said.

Joe Spiegelberg of Anaheim Hills, Calif.-based Maude Asbury Albums & Accessories said the company had exhibited at MemoryTrends in the past, but not in the last few years.

He said he liked the intimacy and central position of scrapbooking at MemoryTrends, but it was a “double-edged sword,” because of the lack of crossover retailers.

“We've really been thrilled (here),” Spiegelberg added, of the recent CHA show.

Parts of the showfloor not devoted to scrapbooking and paper crafts, though, looked sparsely populated. Exhibitors there said previous years were better.

“Traffic is down,” said Jean Figueiredo with Natl. Nonwovens, a wool felt company – whose booth was in the general crafts section – that has exhibited at CHA for more than 15 years. The company usually gets plenty of leads from the CHA show, she added, and representatives did see their important customers.

At the Falk Industries booth, manned by J.R. and Valerie Dryden, on the edge of the scrapbooking and fabric-quilting-needlecraft sections, it was a different story. Midway through the third day of the show, Valerie Dryden said the textile company had written only three orders, which wouldn't cover the cost of exhibiting at the show.

“Last year was the worst show that we worked, and this one will beat it,” J.R. Dryden said.

Lee said he had heard only positive comments, adding, “I think the average exhibitor is having a pretty decent show.”