Rise and Fall of the SIA Trade Show

The annual extravaganza was an expensive way to do business.

The 70-year history of Snowsports Industries America began with the first National Wintersports Show, organized by 10th Mountain Division veteran and ad salesman Nick Hock with trade-show impresario Andrew Squires. The first event was held at New York’s Statler Hotel in May 1952, after shops had closed out their winter seasons. About 50 importers and manufacturers showed their lines, each company occupying a hotel room or suite.

(Photo top: A race for prestige drove more expensive displays.)

The following year a handful of those companies met at the show to form their own nonprofit, the National Ski Equipment and Clothing Association (NSECA). Squires went on to organize regional shows in San Francisco and Chicago, then Boston and Los Angeles. Eventually the NSECA took over running the shows. In 1959 the organization rebranded as Ski Industries America (SIA) and in 1963 hired another 10th Mountain veteran, Doc DesRoches, as executive director.

Alpine skiing was booming across North America and Europe. Each year dozens of new lifts opened, new equipment and clothing brands launched, and hundreds of new ski shops opened. Sporting-goods and department stores created their own ski shops, including retail giants like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. The trade shows outgrew the hotel scene, and SIA members wanted a more efficient way to meet with retailers.

In March 1972, SIA consolidated the regional hotel-based trade shows into a single national event at the newly expanded Las Vegas Convention Center, which was easily capable of accommodating more than the trade show’s 15,000 visitors. Retailers enjoyed cheap flights and cheap hotel rooms, subsidized by casino operations.

Because it was a member-owned nonprofit, SIA’s 200-plus corporate members enjoyed low rental rates for their sprawling exhibition space. Retailers grumbled that the March dates forced them to make purchase decisions before spring break ended, when they still had unsold inventory to clear out. But the earlier date fit better for ski, boot and binding manufacturers, who needed to place orders for raw materials and plan their summer production runs. The date was still too late for many larger clothing companies, who had to order fabric and ship it to sewing factories (often in East Asia) in time to get finished goods reshipped to North America for August delivery.

Vendors made good use of the space. Skiwear companies turned their fashion shows into stage acts, with music and dancing models. The larger hardgoods distributors, competing to be one-stop vendors, by now needed square footage to display skis, boots, bindings, poles, goggles, hats, gloves and bags, plus private order-writing rooms. Independent reps with multiple product lines hustled between booths to meet their retail clients. Plenty of business—and funny business—was conducted after hours, in bars, restaurants, hotel rooms and strip clubs.

Meanwhile, in 1970, a handful of New York State specialty ski shop owners had organized a buying group, Sports Merchandising Corp., to consolidate their bargaining power with suppliers. Quickly, the Sports Specialists Guild (later, League) formed as an alliance of mostly Midwestern ski shops. The two groups met annually with invited vendors in late January, a compromise time frame that satisfied neither the big clothing companies (which wanted orders in December) nor the gear companies (which wanted to see season-end inventories before writing orders).

The buying-group meetings were much more efficient than the trade shows. They were open only to members and the invited large vendors; vendors made presentations to groups of buyers, who then collaborated on single, large orders. Company CEOs met directly with shop owners.

The heady growth of the 1960s leveled out after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973–74, and the era of stagflation that followed sent interest rates above 22 percent. American manufacturers, unable to finance summer production, closed or sent production overseas. Large European suppliers fired their importers and set up their own distribution subsidiaries. The consolidation and contraction of Alpine segments was barely offset by the arrival of rowdy snowboarders, beginning around 1978. Meanwhile, the fewer (and larger) vendors competed for attention, in part with ever more elaborate booth set-ups. A sort of arms race developed, and some smaller vendors spent far too much to look successful. It could cost $250,000 to build and run a respectable booth.

Las Vegas was and is a strong union town. Ancillary costs rose. By 1981, when David Ingemie succeeded DesRoches as president of SIA, vendors were fretting about the monstrosity of the sales cycle. To do a single product turn, vendors and their reps had to visit shops in December (to get skiwear orders), the buying group shows in late January, on-snow demo fairs in February, Las Vegas in March and regional rep shows in April.

And then came a new distraction. The Outdoor Retailer (OR) Show launched in 1981, serving the much broader field of adventure sports. Many ski dealers and vendors needed to attend OR’s summer market in July and winter market in January. Technical clothing companies like Patagonia and The North Face dropped out of SIA and married OR.

SIA sought ways to rationalize the selling cycle. In 2002 the show was moved up to late January. In 2010 the board accepted a killer offer from the Colorado Convention Center and sent the whole circus 700 miles east to Denver. The move did save money, and the show atmosphere grew more businesslike without the distractions of Vegas. The buying groups accepted SIA’s invitation to hold their meetings concurrently in the convention center, which saved even more time and money for all.

But the move didn’t solve timing problems, nor the flight of activity toward the OR Show. When Ingemie retired in 2016, the SIA board hired Nick Sargent, a veteran of the Salomon and Burton marketing machines, and ordered him to figure out what to do with a trade show model that no longer seemed to make sense.

In an era when major suppliers—and some retail chains—were owned by hedge funds or public corporations, managers came under increasing pressure to rationalize that sales cycle. If you had to go to the buying group shows and the rep shows, what was the point of the trade show? Sargent and the board decided that shouldn’t be their problem and in 2017 sold the Denver show to Emerald Holding Inc., a New York–based producer of trade shows, trade publications and business-enterprise software, and owner of the OR Show. Emerald paid $13 million. In 2019, SIA used some of the money to buy Bernie Weichsel’s East Coast consumer ski shows.

Emerald folded the snowsports exhibits into its OR Winter Market at the Colorado Convention Center. As a publicly traded company, Emerald needed a profit on booth-space rental. In 2017, the cost per square foot to exhibitors more than doubled. Over the next two years, skiing’s presence within the OR world began to shrink.

Then came Covid.

The 2020 and 2021 trade shows were cancelled. Miraculously, skiing and the outdoor sports industries enjoyed a couple of boom years. Trade shows didn’t matter! Emerald’s stock price, which peaked at $25 in 2017, plunged to under $2 during the Covid interregnum and trades at about $5 today.

When trade shows resumed in 2022, ski-specialized companies opted out. The buying groups brilliantly consolidated into the single Winter Sports Retailer organization, run by Gary Fleming, a former Elan exec. Its late-January meetings in Salt Lake City have become a single, efficient Winter Sports Market (WSM).

According to Fleming, WSM has 117 retail-store members and invites about 150 non-member specialty stores to participate for a total attendance of only about 1,700 buyers. “Authorized” suppliers are invited to present lines, and non-authorized vendors are allowed to exhibit at a higher booth-rental rate. “A big supplier saves up to $150,000 versus what they paid in the past,” Fleming estimates. The selling cycle makes a lot more sense, too.

Under Sargent, SIA still provides valuable research services and conducts educational “summits” for its members. It recently provided invaluable guidance on the ban of PFAS in outdoor performance clothing. But it’s out of the trade-show business. We all are. 

The author thanks David Ingemie, Gary Fleming, Mike Adams and Diane Boyer for insight into recent trade-show history.