California Apparel News

Just six weeks before it was scheduled to run, Agenda postponed its Jan. 3–4 trade-show dates at the Long Beach Convention Center in Long Beach, Calif.

Show owner Reed Exhibitions announced Nov. 19 that it would focus its energies on making Agenda in Long Beach a consumer-oriented event. Trade shows have no choice but to concentrate on consumer events, said Ron Walden, Reed’s group vice president of fashion and festivals.

“The business of fashion for our customers has changed dramatically over the past five years,” Walden said. “While large brands are focused on fewer, more meaningful retail relationships, small startup brands are utilizing technology and digital platforms to market and sell directly to the consumer. This makes meaningful experiences with consumers more important for our customer brands both large and small.”

In July 2017, Agenda unveiled the Agenda Festival as a consumer day with a pop-up market, food trucks and music, which took place in the Long Beach Convention Center on the heels of the two-day trade show.

Reed promised that Agenda would continue to look for opportunities to promote events with retailers and brands through the Agenda Festival. Agenda’s upcoming Feb. 5–7 show dates in Las Vegas will continue to be in a trade-show format, according to a Reed statement. Earlier this year, Agenda announced it is moving its trade show from the Las Vegas Strip to The Pavilions at World Market Center Las Vegas downtown.

Aaron Levant, Agenda’s founder, left Reed in March to start a new digital venture called NTWRK, but he continues to work as a consultant for the Agenda trade show.

“It’s the right path,” Levant said. “It’s a continuation of the direction I started with innovative, progressive events such as Agenda Emerge [TED-style talks and panels on industry topics] and ComplexCon.”

Levant co-founded ComplexCon in 2016. Like the Agenda Festival, it’s a retail pop-up market that also features art, food trucks, industry panels and hip-hop concerts.

Levant said that there is still a viable trade-show market for apparel and fashion in Las Vegas. But direct-to-consumer events are on the rise. They are absorbing some of the elements of business-to-business trade shows.

“I saw as many trade people at ComplexCon as I did at trade shows,” he said.

Inviting the public to the shows might better serve manufacturers and brand owners. They’ll be able to witness firsthand which brands and products their customers prefer. “It’s not a trade show, but it has a trade edge,” Levant said of the consumer-focused events.

For the past decade, Agenda’s January trade show overwhelmingly exhibited Fall styles. It was one of the big events on the West Coast trade-show calendar for streetwear and action-sports brands such as Vans.

But in the past few years Agenda started to stumble when a number of prominent surf brands bowed out of the show. At the last run of Agenda, in June, there were only a handful of surf brands.

Joel Cooper, chief executive officer of Lost International, said that surf brands continue to be loyal to Surf Expo, an Emerald Expositions show that runs biannually in Orlando, Fla.

But the scheduling of the Agenda show in January was poor, Cooper said, because brands often did not have their samples ready and grumbled about working at a trade show a few days after the New Year holiday. The June trade show is being replaced with the Agenda Festival.

Brian Boles, co-founder of the WVS BRGDE brand, had a booth at the January Agenda show. “There were no sales. It was absolutely just crickets,” he said. “We’re focusing direct to consumer and e-commerce now. We have more margin. We can deal with customers themselves and get more feedback.”

But he was interested in exhibiting at the consumer-focused Agenda Festival.

Patrik Schmidle, president of market researcher ActionWatch, said the wholesale market for the skate and streetwear markets, which comprise some of the show’s prime exhibitors, has been struggling for years.

Since 2014, the panel of retailers charted by ActionWatch has seen business decline by 5 percent in 2017 over 2016. However, the wholesale channel experienced an uptick in 2018 with sales rising 1 percent from January to September compared to the same period in 2017.