Anyone at MAGIC????

We were at Magic yesterday, but are going back today- need to get back to the business. If we had another day, we would check out Project and then head over to the Christian Audigier show "If I Move You Move" (yes, he did his OWN trade show this year- over at Caesar's Palace).

Magic was HUGE. 120,000 people are supposedly in town for it. Some booths are enormous, some booths you need an appointment to get into and otherwise can't go in at all (ex. The Hundreds and many of the smaller, more exclusive labels), some booths are totally enclosed-- like their own stores within the convention center, some booths are small, but just about everyone really does it UP for Magic. My recommendation for if you are thinking about ever doing Magic-- don't go if you can't afford to do a great booth and don't go if you can't get a decent booth position. The place is SO enormous, that is you are stuck in the back corner, the likelihood that people are going to walk past you isn't that great.

The busiest areas were Streetwear (urban and athletic type clothing)--this place was slammed- and the "Junior's" area where most of the women's boutiques and labels show, as well as some of the blank manufactuers. The Streetwear area was NUTS. A lot of these booths had celebrities in them to draw a crowd-- for example, the Tapout booth was slammed- had a HUGE crowd with video cameras, flashes going off, people pushing to see in- all because Kimbo Slice (a fighter, for those of you who don't know) was in there. Most of the aisles in the Streetwear area were very crowded. I was skeptical that many of these people were actually retailers or buyers-- a lot were dressed in there hoochie-iest outfits and looked like they might have just been there for the party.

Pool was dead when I was there. Very quiet and slow. A lot of the exhibiters were just kind of standing outside of their booths looking a little lost, or talking to each other. I don't know if it picked up later.

I did take some pictures on my camera phone- they are blurry, but I will try to post them later. You aren't really supposed to take pictures at Magic, but I did manage to snap some.

BareApparel, good tips for others thinking about doing Magic. What you said about not going unless you can spend a lot and get good booth position is the thing I definitely came away with as being the most important. With SO MANY brands, its obvious that there is going to be A LOT of repetition as far as the designing and styles you see at shows like these. The only way to really get noticed is to have a spectacular booth. Even if your clothing itself is incredible, you'll get overlooked if you can't attract anybody to see it!

Just out of curiosity, does anybody have even a ballpark idea of how much a very large, extravagant booth costs at Magic? Not necessarily like the MAJOR booths that were basically their own enclosed stores, but maybe something a notch or two less? $50,000? $100,000? It has to be up there.

Anyways, for anyone who has never been to a trade show of that caliber, I suggest you go just to get an idea of how competitive the clothing industry actually is. It was my first time, and even though I knew this was a competitive industry, it REALLY hit me when I experienced Magic. And those are only the brands that can afford to exhibit their stuff! It'll really give any new clothing line owners an idea of how much work this industry demands of you to be successful.

I was there as well (Sunday through Wednesday night). I went to a bunch of the seminars and learned a lot. That is mainly the reason why I went this year. Seeing all of the booths full of such similar clothes is daunting. There are a lot of companies trying to jam themselves into one market. Crazy. Where I live, there aren't many companies really doing the same thing so to see the whole market represented was definitely worth the registration fee alone.

I was very impressed with a lot of the small booths. With so many of them at the show it was interesting to see how everyone tried to make themselves stand out.

I actually thought the sourcing part of the show was pretty good. I heard some grumblings that it was pretty thin compared to past years but there were still a lot of people to talk business with.

It is hard for me to believe that the expense of going to magic as an exibitor is worth it for about 2/3rds of the companies there but, you have to try something to find out if it works for you...