The other week James, Phil (that’s me), Colin, and Rich hot-tailed it over to the ISPO show in Munich to get a real feel for the size of the outdoor industry and meet a lot of new brands that we wanted to sign up to the site and shop. James will probably do a follow up post to this soon, but from my perspective, the main thing that struck me was the sheer size of the thing. The exhibition centre itself was about 15x that of the NEC in Birmingham and it took us the whole day to go through 3 of the 21 halls!
There was a huge number of brands present all showcasing their entire range and I’m amazed by how many products there actually are out there and what a small % of them we actually stock right now. I think if we had unlimited cash we would have bought up everything there including the really cute kid’s walking boots!
We’ve signed some top brands for that event that will go live later this year and started to pre-order the gear. Even my favourite ones are now ready to go live… of which I think Merrell went live on monday…
Key Highlights for me:
- A taxi driver taking us down some dodgy country back roads in the middle of nowhere late one night
- Living the high life in the 1* hotel Jame had booked us all into - and we had to share a room with bunk beds!
- James drinking a good 8 steins of 2 pint beers and feeling a bit worse for wear on the morning of our flight
- Signing our new brands and having some great team strategy meetings after having missed our initial flight.
I’ve put some photos below from the event and you can see the full set here on Flickr
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