Sourcing at Magic 2023 review!

With the Feb 2023 Sourcing at Magic show coming to an end. Here are our highlights, things to know and review of the show

1) Stall Allotment

We were allotted the stall no 63127, which happened to be at the very front edge of the exhibition hall. Which seemed quite odd on how the stalls' location were decided as we were quite early in showing our interest for the show.

A little digging, we found out that the stall is divided by "Pavilions", where exhibitors from every country are clubbed together. And under this exhibitors from the same field are clubbed together as well.

There was only one company that had Home and Kitchen textiles on display and hence we were pushed to the side.

Although being a lone ranger in a field would be more preferable than being in a sea of vendors doing the same thing. Getting pushed to the edge was definitely not desired ever.

We had a few issues with the allotment process. The full payment for the stall allotment is taken before vendors are shown their stalls. Hence invariably you could pay the same amount for someone who gets the most premium location. It all depends on how the staff at Magic decides to arrange their stalls.

We had also come across some exhibitors in the apparel field who were placed on a opposite end of the hall away right at the end of the footwear part of the hall. They were too, extremely disappointed by the stall allocation and complained at the end of Day 1 that only 7 people had visited their stall. Point to note, they had paid the same amount of money as anyone else on the floor but they were not placed in the apparel or even the textile section of the hall.

2) Pre check-in information and pre-shipping merchandise.

Credit where it is due, Magic was very prepared to helping our exhibitors fly in their displays before the event as well as to inform us on what to expect while setting up our stalls.

Our particular stall was setup through FIEO nominated company, and almost everything was as we expected it to be when we showed up.

We had decided to carry our merchandise with us to the hall ourselves hence we can not speak about the shipping experience ourselves. But other vendors around us did not complain about facing any issues regarding shipping.

Checking in during the setup day was very easy, we had reached the exhibition hall at 10:50am, while the check-in time on official communication from Magic was 11am. However, there were other exhibitors who had check-in before us and were already almost done setting up their stalls.

3) The show in numbers

In a total of 3 days the show lasted we had a total of 31 unique visitors to our stall.

Please find the day wise breakup of the unique visits below:

Day 1 : 17 visitors

Day 2 : 14 visitors

Day 3 : 0 Visitors

Out of these 31 visitors, only 7 seemed to us as buyers that were serious about the products we had to offer. This might be different for every business depending on their size or field.

From these 7 buyers we had 3 buyers come in multiple times and were even able to secure orders from one during the show.

4) Post show numbers

We had one of the visitors invite us to their company head quarters in LA a day after the event.

One of the other visitors has scheduled to visit our factory two weeks after the show ended.

Two weeks after the event, we are doing costing for about five clients.

Remarks

• On average, visitors seemed to engage more than other trade shows if they walked past your stall

• Magic reported the visitors as a total of all visitors coming to all three of their events. Not the amount of visitors that visited "Sourcing"

• From my experience there was at least 5x more people at the other events hosted by Magic than at "Sourcing"