Click here for the complete photo gallery
For the past two days (August 1 – 2, 2012) the Agenda Show has packed buyers, brands, and the media into the Long Beach California Convention Center and dazzled them with a wild array of clothing, accessories, surfboards, and skateboards.
Because of its growing size it seemed like more than a few industry veterans still couldn’t help comparing the Agenda Show to the long defunct ASR Show. With the exception of a small area of tables (the Agenda Cafe) on the South East end of the center, the entire 224,000 square feet of floor space was filled.
Everything felt bigger. We had to park farther away. We walked in large groups from the parking garage. Inside on the Berrics Agenda skateboarding end of the show it was often difficult to walk down an aisle without having to say excuse me several times. It seemed too busy writing orders to even look up. And that played into the feeling of bigness even more.
“It’s really not that much bigger,” Agenda Co-founder Aaron Levant said. “We have about 50 new brands, but we also had a few brands that wanted to increase the size of their booths.”
Even with those increases, however, at least one of the brands who took more space this year believed they could have used even more. “We’ve been writing orders all day,” said a partner at one clothing brand. “And our sales manager came back to me and said if we had more room to show the line we could have written more orders.”
With that kind of thinking Agenda can only get bigger. But one thing is for sure: the Agenda Show is still virtually free of the bikini models that seemed to get so much play back in the day. “We did let one exhibitor have a model,” Levant said. “But that’s because they’re a clothing company that makes bikinis and buyers need to see how they fit.”
To check out the people and products we saw at Agenda click the link for complete photo gallery.
