The Outdoor Retailer Trade Show - Summer Market Demo Day started today with sub-par retailer turnout despite being held at a new venue to better accommodate the crowds and gear available for demo.
After moving to Denver two years ago, the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market trade show held a two day demo day, titled Demo Experience at Denver’s Commons Park and part of Confluence Park. The parks are located on the edge of downtown Denver and were a short distance from the convention center that you could walk or bike to.
Unfortunately parking was terrible, attendee participation seemed OK, but not great and water access was not in the same place as the exhibiting area. This year the demo day was moved to Chatfield State Park in South West Denver, which we can only guess was prompted by the downtown venue challenges.
Chatfield State Park should have been a great location for the demo day with its expansive beach and huge lake to accommodate SUPs, kayaks and other water sports equipment, but in our opinion the location put it out of reach for many and we didn’t see any major online promotion before the event date enticing attendees to come out.
The park is located around 30 miles southwest from the Colorado Convention Center where the Outdoor Retailer Trade Show is held. Even though they were offering buses to take attendees from the convention center and back, the attendance still seemed lower than what it should have been.
With the buses only running at certain times, being so far away, plus dealing with traffic, it felt like the morning was when the largest numbers of people were at the demo day. Once that first wave of retailers came and went by bus, the rest of the day was very slow with retailers and industry locals trickling in and out throughout the day.
Photo of the Adidas – Terrex booth shows it overflowing with trail running shoes ready for anyone to demo
Despite having a huge footprint for the brands to exhibit and being located right on the beach front, the amount of brands in attendance also seemed low with only around 30 brands participating.
Some of the products you could find included an air conditioning unit by Zero Breeze made for inside tents that will go live on Indiegogo. There was local teardrop trailer manufacture Colorado Teardrops from Boulder, CBD brand MedTerra, metal detector brand Minelab and even a pepper ball gun made by PepperBall, called the LifeLite for defending yourself against wildlife like bears and moose.
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You know show staff is trying to spread things out and make it look bigger than it seems when space between booth isles is massive; to add insult when there are no crowds to fill this space, it really showcases the lack of retailers in attendance.
Even so, being lakeside allowed a handful of water sport brands to showcase their stand up paddle boards, kayaks and inflatables. Brands such as Body Glove, Kala, Naish and Pelican were all on hand offering demos, but as the pictures show, exhibitors still had plenty of products sitting around going un-used on demo day.
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Unfortunately exhibitors did not get what they had hoped for with retailer attendance and sending out product for demos. We spoke to a number of the exhibitors as they sat around hoping for more retailers to show up, but instead were surfing the internet or social media on their phones, playing corn hole and even playing a guitar waiting for the day to end.
“Outdoor Retailer has lost touch with what this demo is supposed to be and supporting the brands that have supported the show” said a brand marketing manager who asked to remain anonymous. They went on to critique OR(Outdoor Retailer) for not advertising the demo day enough, for not finding a closer location to the convention center and for allowing brands to exhibit that could be considered outside the scope of OR in terms of what products the company is displaying; they were also not happy about brands exhibiting that are sold through big box stores rather than local specialty retailers that the show is supposed to be catering too.
Despite the low retailer turn out there were some brands that seemed to be fairly busy for a good part of the day. With four different sunscreen brands exhibiting and a handful of food brands, retailers were able to get some free samples and one sunscreen brand that’s new told us they had great time exhibiting at the Demo Experience and were satisfied with the number of retailers they introduced to their product.
So what does this mean for next year’s Outdoor Retailer Summer Market Demo Day? Only time will tell, but it doesn’t look like a good outlook with OR already cutting days off their Winter Market trade show and other industry trade shows cutting days or canceling shows all together. For now though the Demo Experience is over and it’s time to head indoors to see over 1000 brands and the products they want you to buy. (Updated 9/2019 to include Outdoor Retailer Winter Market is now canceled)
The 2020 Outdoor Retailer Summer Market Trade Show is scheduled for June 23rd-25th at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, CO with no mention if there will be a demo day or not.
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