Gift Show ‘Exiles’ Forced to Pitch Tent : New Rules Put Many Away From the Action, Sellers Complain

For the past 16 years, the California Gift Show always found Toshi and Shumpei Takahashi peddling their imported Japanese wood carvings from two booths--Nos. 1701 and 1702--in the middle of the bustling main hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

But when the next show opens during the last week of July, the Takahashis will be missing from their familiar spot. Instead, to the couple’s dismay, they will exhibit their wares--featuring wooden bear sculptures sold at National Park gift shops--in the temporary tent structures that rise like blisters along Figueroa Street.

“This is terrible,” said Toshi Takahashi, 68, who has helped her husband run their import business for 20 years. “The bubbles (as the tents are known) are the worst part of the show--not enough retailers go there to buy.”

Takahashi is not the only one complaining. Many longtime exhibitors at the California Gift Show--one of the nation’s largest gift-industry trade shows, held the last weeks of January and July--are up in arms over losing their choice spots. The changes were made by the show’s new management.

Many exhibitors--some of whom rely on the show for 25% or more of their annual sales--expect that their new locations will cost them business. “I think our customers will have a hard time locating us now,” said Takahashi, who, like many others, learned of the location changes two weeks ago, when letters confirming their reservations arrived in the mail.

The controversy has also served to unite many of the exhibitors--many of whom are small independent entrepreneurs--for the first time. Some have threatened to stage rival shows at the nearby Shrine Auditorium or the Anaheim Convention Center.

Management Not Surprised

“Everybody is so outraged about this,” said one exhibitor who did not want to be identified. “This is unprecedented in the industry.”

AMC Trade Shows Ltd., which bought out the show’s previous management the first of this year, is not surprised by the uproar. “In the kind of major overhauling we have made,” says AMC General Manager Jack Chalden, “it is almost inevitable that we won’t please everyone.”

What AMC, a subsidiary of the Atlanta Merchandise Center owned by architect John Portman, did was radically change the rules that have traditionally governed the allocation of space at trade shows.

Deciding who gets what space has always been a touchy matter. “That’s always been the bugaboo of trade shows,” says George Van Ess, vice president of sales and marketing for Royal Cathay, a South San Francisco gift wholesaler. “Everybody always wonders how other people got better space.”

Like real estate, the key to success in a trade show, exhibitors say, relies on three things: location, location and location.

In the case of the convention center, which has hosted the more than half-century-old trade show since 1971, the main hall is the place to be. “Everybody vies for that main hall,” says Bennett Sparks, owner of Russwood Inc., which specializes in crystal, English china and clocks. “That’s where the most traffic is; it’s easiest to get at and the most attractive.”

Next in terms of desirability is the North Hall, a separate 150,000-square-foot structure on the corner of Figueroa and 11th streets. At the bottom of the list are the bubble structures, composed of heavy-duty fabric stretched over an aluminum skeleton.

Besides attracting less traffic than the other halls, the bubbles don’t have restrooms and are cold in the winter and hot in the summer, says Jack Carlow Jr., owner of La Casa de Carlo, a wholesale basket and rattan firm. Besides, says Carlow, who was assigned to the bubbles after seven years in the North Hall, “the bubbles have a peculiar plastic smell.”

Under a seniority system followed by most trade shows, the exhibitors are assured the same space they occupied at the previous show. Those with the most years of attendance get first crack at moving up to more desirable locations. The most senior firms ended up in the heavily traveled main hall. The junior firms got stuck with the tent bubbles.

But AMC did away with the seniority system, saying many of the veteran exhibitors who have acquired booths over time have sublet their space in the main hall at “exorbitant prices,” Chalden says. The system also tended to lock out new companies with innovative new products, he says.

After polling retailers, AMC decided to group the exhibitors into about a dozen categories--such as baskets, toys, ceramics, novelties--to make it easier for the 40,000 to 50,000 buyers who come to the California show to locate products.

Stationery items, ceramics, collectibles and other mainstays of the gift business were placed in the main hall. Many of the companies that ended up in the dreaded bubbles were grouped in the international gifts category.

The new arrangements required nearly every one of the 1,200 exhibitors, spread among 3,000 booths, to move to different locations. Although it may make life easy for the buyers, it irked the exhibitors.

“Nobody wants to be next to their competitors,” says Carlow. “All the buyers are going to do is go from one booth to the next booth dickering the prices down.”

Says Van Ess: “The show has always been a success because it has been a mishmash of merchandise.”

But AMC is confident that new arrangements will boost attendance and, eventually, be copied by other trade shows across the country.

“I wish we didn’t have to go through with this,” says Chalden, but “it will pay off in years to come.”