Turning Up the Heat in Dallas

It wasn’t nearly hot enough in Florida so we headed off to the Dallas Home and Gift market to see what was happening there. I’ll tell ya, there’s nothing like that midday Texas heat shimmering up off 12 lanes of freeway to make you appreciate a sea breeze. Actually it really wasn’t all that bad – the nights are still below 80 - but that will change in a few weeks…

Dallas is the kickoff of the summer show season and while it is not as big as Atlanta, the big players are all there and many debut their mid-year releases at this show. There are 2300 permanent showrooms and several times a year they set up hundreds more temporary booths on a number of floors. Mix in a lot of regional and Texas vendors (oh wait – that’s the same thing in the Republic of Texas) and you have a pretty impressive venue. The Dallas Market Center is just north of downtown and has four main buildings: the 4 story Trade Mart with about one million square feet of space, the 15 story World Trade Center (3.1 million square feet), the International Trade Plaza (440,000 square feet) and the Market Hall at 214,000 square feet. A lot of ground to cover in a few long days but we managed to pull it off.

Trade Mart entry (World Trade Center is poking up on the right)

Traffic started out a little slow on Friday morning but did build through the day, and it really ramped up for the weekend. The exhibitors we talked with had mixed opinions on how the show was going, from good to really bad, but that seems to be the case in most every show. We have not heard any final wrap-up from the exhibitors or the DMC but probably will next week in Atlanta.

Atrium of the WTC

Mid-season releases tend to be a little spotty, not everybody does them and/or not every time. They can range from a little refresh of a collection to a full blown roll out of a new line (our favorite…) however we're happy no matter what they are. We had several nice debuts this time, here are three of them:

Ellen Krans at Burton&Burton

Life Is Country® at Big Sky Carvers/Demdaco

Ronnie Walter at Carson's

One of our goals at every show or market is to meet new clients, and this one turned into a pretty good trip. We also managed to lay some important groundwork for Atlanta next week.

Wait – next week? But I just got home…