NeoCon East Finds a New Home

In the contract furniture industry, NeoCon casts a large shadow over the annual trade show line-up. Over the years the importance of that June date in Chicago has grown to the point that it consumes a huge share of the marketing budgets of most manufacturers. In companies all across the industry, new product development is centered on NeoCon. Advertising dollars are clustered. Money for showroom updates and trade show exhibits seem to evaporate from corporate coffers during the May-June period.

No matter how big or how good NeoCon in Chicago gets, there is still a need for regional trade shows. Not everyone who is interested in seeing first hand what’s new, can travel to Chicago to see it. Old timers like me long for the good old days of West Week in LA in the spring, Neocon (in those days, it didn’t have the capital “C” in the middle) in Chicago in June and Designer’s Saturday in New York in the fall. Then there were all the smaller local “post Neocon” shows in many markets.

Over the years, the industry has shown a unique preference for trade shows that are linked to permanent showrooms. The glory days of Designer’s Saturday were spent happily walking or cabbing from one Manhattan showroom to the next. And the choice of Saturday as the named day of the show reflected the “billable hours” pressure design firms felt even then.

The first few years of the IDCNY presented New York with a true parallel to Neocon, and for a time, it seemed Designer’s Saturday had found a new single location home, but the vagaries of real estate and the hesitance of the A&D community to venture into the wilds of Long Island City finally brought Designer’s Saturday down. Since then, several things have been tried, but nothing has grown to the prominence of Designer’s Saturday.

First Look at the New York Design Center (NYDC) is growing steadily, but it is a show put on by the NYDC for the benefit of the tenants of NYDC, and it’s hard to imagine how it might grow to become the big all-inclusive show the New York market deserves.

The positioning of ICFF as an international “luxury contemporary design” show is not aligned with the needs of contract market, so it doesn’t seem to be the likely successor to Designer’s Saturday.

On the left coast, West Week couldn’t survive the changing tenant demographics of the “Blue Whale.” As contract manufacturers moved out and residential manufacturers and importers moved in, West Week, reborn as Neocon West, tried to make a go of it in the LA Convention Center and subsequently in other locations, but the organizers just couldn’t make it work.

Nonetheless, recognizing the need for a West Coast trade show led several contract manufacturers to organize the one-an-out Las Vegas debacle where a godly number of exhibitors showed up but embarrassingly, visitors did not!

For a number of years, Neocon East was a successful mid-Atlantic, GSA-focused contract trade show. With programming featuring topics of concern and interest to the facilities people of government agencies, the participation of most of the major contract manufacturers and a location in Baltimore that was easy to reach from Washington D.C., it drew visitors from the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area very well and a few from Philadelphia and northward. But then came the great recession, a government shutdown and various other negative factors that led to declining attendance and declining participation by manufacturers.

So last year the NeoCon organizers at MMPI, now rebranded as “The Mart,” a unit of Vornado Realty Trust, made a risky decision to move NeoCon East from Baltimore to Philadelphia. Not everybody among potential exhibitors was enthusiastic. Many manufacturers’ attendance was predicated on the attendance of GSA people, and there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether attendees would travel from Washington to Philadelphia in order to attend.

We also heard other concerns leading up to the date last week: “The Philadelphia market itself isn’t big enough for a show of NeoCon East’s magnitude.” “Do you think people will travel from New York to attend NeoCon East?” “Given the costs involved, we’ve decided to wait and see whether the audience materializes this year before we commit to attending NeoCon East in the future.”

For the NeoCon East team at the Mart, all that self-doubt wasn’t acceptable. They’d made the decision, and now they had to make it work.

In a press release in July, NeoCon East Vice President of Sales, Julie Kohl, said, “Philadelphia’s regional design associations are some of the strongest in the US. What better way to start off our first year in a new city than by connecting with the local A&D community through its highly active industry organizations? We’re pleased to be hitting the ground running by partnering with them and DIFFA in creative and engaging ways. These relationships reinforce our standing as an important industry show with strong roots in the GSA/government community and an increasingly powerful influence across all the key commercial vertical markets that converge at NeoCon in Chicago.”

And indeed, the magic combination of active participation of the design associations and GSA, the location in Philadelphia and the willingness of many of the top industry manufacturers to “roll the dice” and give the new venue a try succeeded in exceeding the expectations of most of the stakeholders I spoke to at the show.

The fact that the weather was not particularly cooperative, with rain off and on throughout, didn’t seem to have a significant effect. The Philadelphia area AIA showed its endorsement by holding its 13^th annual Design on the Delaware Conference at the Pennsylvania Convention Center concomitantly with NeoCon East. The Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware Chapter of IIDA hosted its 14^th annual IIDA Product Parade, and a “block Party” on the NeoCon East show floor the first night of the show. ASID delivered its latest “Interior Design Outlook and State of the Industry” findings and provided guided tours of the show to student members to help them learn the ins and outs of navigating the show for the first time.

Denise Turner Roth, the newly appointed GSA Administrator, gave a strong endorsement of NeoCon East by showing up in person to deliver a special presentation on her vision for the future of GSA. Any GSA employee wondering whether it would be worthwhile to attend could look no further. And from the informal conversations I had with exhibitors, it seems that the attendance of GSA people was the best in recent years – despite the additional travel time to Philadelphia.

From the standpoint of visitors looking at the list of exhibitors to decide whether attendance would be worthwhile, the news was also good. The bright and spacious show floor in the Pennsylvania Convention Center provided an excellent backdrop for the more than 250 companies that had made the decision to give the new venue a chance. Of the industry’s four largest furniture companies (Haworth, Herman Miller, HNI and Steelcase) only Steelcase was missing. The other three, along with Global and Teknion, prominently greeted visitors to the show on the front row.

The “vibe” of the show was upbeat and energetic. Exhibitors reported being very pleased with both the number and quality of attendees and attendees reported the same about the exhibitors – it is a two way street you know.

I think it is safe to say NeoCon East has found a happy new home in Philadelphia.