Just ten years ago, Larry Schur was producing a series of 100-booth shows targeting the nursery furniture markets that rotated between the East and West Coasts. It wasn’t until shortly after the events of September 11 that the market’s various retail groups revealed an astonishing insistence on gathering together for a trade event. Only two months later, in November, the Association of Independent Specialty Stores was born and with it launched Schur’s first event which would rapidly evolve into the ABC Kids Expo. That first event, recalls Schur, sold out its 100 booths at Las Vegas’ Tropicana in 48 hours and had a waiting list of 300 more booths. That pattern essentially continued as the show grew exponentially, pausing only during 2009 which was the event’s first flat year in booth rentals.

In 2010, the ABC Kids Expo, which has grown into a $5 million event, attracted 1,003 exhibitors with 3,670 booths. Schur’s All Baby & Child, Inc., which organizes the Expo, is now the industry’s dominant organization supporting the various retailer groups and associations that once individually served the market. Through a partnership agreement, the ABC Kids Expo helps fund the various buyer groups in exchange for making sure the retailers show up to the event.

EXPO: Take us back to when you founded the show. What was the opportunity for you guys?

Schur: I was the executive director of the National Independent Nursery Furniture Retailers Association. At the time, I ran the trade association, which was about 100 mom and pop juvenile product stores and specialty retail stores and I had the opportunity to produce some small shows.

There were two other specialty mom-and-pop retail groups as well and our shows were all in the spring, the early part of May, every year. There was also a manufacturing show called JPMA, which was always in the fall.

September 11 occurred and the JPMA cancelled their October 2001 show and moved it on top of all of our specialty shows in May. Of course it’s the same manufacturers and exhibitors and there’s no way any of our retail shows could go on.

When that happened, I contacted the corporate Hilton property that I had a contract with in Pasadena and said we couldn’t do our event. They wouldn’t let me out of my contract. The attorneys got involved at that point.

While that mess was going on the other two retail groups were getting phone calls from manufactures telling us ‘hey, we have all this product to show, we can’t wait until May to show it.’ This was two weeks after September 11.

I questioned whether having a show at this time was something we wanted to do. It was a pretty heavy risk. We rationalized it because we knew we couldn’t hold the show in May anymore because of the JPMA and we couldn’t wait another year for a show.

One of the groups had a show in Vegas in May at the Tropicana. I called the Tropicana and I told them we wanted to move it up to November. They said, ‘What, are you crazy? Everybody’s leaving Las Vegas and you want to come in?’

So they gave us the exhibit space for free and gave us $29 a night for the rooms. I needed more rooms and I went to the MGM and they gave me rooms for $39 a night.

So, we announced it to the manufacturers that we were putting on a show the first week of November and within 48 hours it was sold out and there was a waiting list with three hundred.

At that point, we called it AISS, the Association of Independent Specialty Stores. We did that for that year and the next.

When we announced it to the retailers and trade they came in droves. It was 100 booths, that’s all we could fit in, and we had about 500 attendees.

That next May, the JPMA started to see a tumble in attendance.

We did it at the Tropicana again in October 2002, this time on two levels. We took up every single nook and cranny of that place with booths. We fit about 150 booths. And we still had 500-600 attendees. But there was a big uprising among the exhibitors because they all wanted more space and we couldn’t give them anymore. Even the second year there was over 300 on the waiting list.

I asked the Las Vegas Convention Center about space for 2003 and told them we didn’t need a lot. Little did I know.

We looked at Hall S3, which is the south wing of the convention center, and decided to take it. The south wing is divided into four halls: S1, 2, 3 and 4.

They were willing to do it on a net square foot basis, so we thought if we don’t fill it up we don’t fill it up. We were standing in this empty hall and it holds 1,100 booths—there is no way in Hell that we’re going to fill this place, we’re at 150 booths!

When we opened registration it went something like this: 100 booths, 200 booths, 400 booths, 800 booths, 1,000 booths, 1,100 booths. And it kept going.

Again, we still had a little over 300 on the waiting list for that show. At that point we rebranded it the ABC Kids Expo, and away it went.

How did the trajectory go after that?

In 2009 there was no waiting list. The number of booths actually dropped from 3,500 to 3,300 and the exhibitor counts went from 1,100 to 900. But that was the only year we actually saw a drop in exhibitors and exhibit space. Attendance was flat, it was 13,700 in 2008 and 13,600 in 2009.

Every year the show has grown. That one year in Hall S3 had 1,100 booths, the next year we were in the central halls. In 2004 we were at 1,400 booths.

We went back to the South Halls, S1 and S2, in 2005 with 1,600 booths. In 2006 in the same halls, we had 1,800 booths. In 2007 we took three halls—1, 2 and 3—where we jumped to 3,000 booths. In 2008 we jumped to 3,569 booths. 2009 we dropped to 3,300 booths and the show just completed in 2010, which was in all 4 halls, was 3,670 booths.

For 2011 in Louisville, we’re already at 3,077.

Are those all re-signs?

It’s a mix. What’s amazing about it is, at the 2010 show we had 1,003 exhibitors with 3,670 booths. Right now we’re only at 590 exhibitors with 3,077 booths. So we’ve still got half the exhibitors yet to come and we’re already at 3,077.

How have you managed this growth operationally?

We worked very mean and lean. In 2001 through 2005 it was only my wife Elizabeth and I. We added another person in 2005 to get us through that year and 2006. We started building in 2007 to today where we have 10 full-time people and one part-time person.

Until two years ago we did all of our own housing in-house. It just got to be way too much. We still do our own registration to this day, and we also handle all of our own booth sales. We’re fortunate that we’re able pick up friends and family along the way. We have a lot of volunteers that we call ‘workationers’ and there’s actually a waiting list of people to work our show every year to come and volunteer.

What do you use the volunteers for?

We use them for the reg counter, mostly. We’re pretty generous. We provide their airfare, lodging all their food and beverage, and we give them one show ticket to whatever they want to see.

Who are your full-time folks and what are they responsible for?

Our full-time folks are floor managers. They also oversee the workationers at the various levels. They also have specific duties,. One of them is responsible for overseeing and maintaining our new product showcase. And another one oversees our mothers’ nursing rooms and our blog bistros that we had this year for the first time.

We have two logistics managers that are each responsible for half of the exhibitors, they’re our customer service people. We also have our show production manager who’s responsible for the overall production of the show and being on the floor. Together we do the booth layouts and the floor plans.

Several of them are responsible for our show pavilions. We have a Naturally Kids pavilion, a Modern Child Pavilion and new this year was a Maternity Square Pavilion.

How have you kept the show fresh and exiting over the years?

The show’s been running great, the word of mouth has been tremendous, and you feel like why do you want to mess with success? And we really don’t, we try not to mess with it. But every year we need to infuse it with something that is new or different.

We had two new things this year, one worked out, and one was more difficult to execute than we thought. The first one was we bought out the wi-fi in the exhibit halls.

How much was that?

It was negotiated down to $20,000. But for $20,000 and 1 million square feet that was definitely worth the investment because we now had something to talk to people about.

We were able to get one of our media publications to sponsor that. We normally have trouble with sponsorships, but in this case, we had an eager partner to do that with.

Every couple years we try to launch a new pavilion. This year we launched Maternity Square. We found that there was a niche in the market that didn’t exist. We knew of several maternity shows that had come and gone in the last few years. So we tried to help the exhibitors and retailers by segmenting them in their own category. We were able to do that pretty quickly, but we also found out, to our frustration, that it’s essential to have a runway show at maternity shows. We’ve never done runway shows, we weren’t that excited to be putting on a runway show and organizing all the props and kids and parents and all the mess that goes along with that.

We assigned a staff person to the pavilion and one of their responsibilities was to get this whole thing together. Our initial plan was to do two shows—child and adult maternity, but we couldn’t get enough of either one to do two full shows. We combined them into one 45-minute show.

It was pretty difficult getting all the products together. We went through an agency for the models.
It turned out excellent. We had 100 chairs and we didn’t know what to expect. We had the runway, the models and an MC and the whole bit. It was standing room only. It was hugely popular.

How does an event like that benefit the show?

There are plusses and minuses. You’re going to get people all in one destination. We had it two-thirds of the way back in one of the exhibit halls, so it pulled people back into the hall. It also provided more bodies in a new area for new exhibitors. The only thing we really had to monitor was the noise level to keep it down so surrounding exhibitors wouldn’t get irritated.

But it was a huge effort that went into it. I can’t say we made any money on it this year. We had to pay for the models, the staging and the props and the A/V.

What was the overall cost of that?

It was about $40,000. We didn’t charge the exhibitors in that section a fee to participate. But we did charge companies that wanted their product in the runway show. It was a nominal fee, but since it was our first year and we wanted to make sure this went really well, it was really nominal.

Will you do it again?

I think that the popularity of it has sparked registration already. That section was fifty booths. We’ve already rented 80 for next year. So I think we’re going to get an increase of booth participation from exhibitors. I think that we’re going to get a lot more product that’s going to help offset some of those costs. We’re not looking to make a lot of money on it, we want to at least break even.

Talk about the economic issues that came out of the last few years and how your event specifically dealt with those.

Normally we leave the show 70 to 80 percent sold out for the next year. When we left the 2008 show, we were at that 75 to 80 percent sold out mark. We don’t ask for deposits until January.

Two weeks after our 2008 show is when the economy took the dive. All of a sudden the cancellations and downsizing started pouring in. I went to the trades and the Las Vegas Convention Authority and between the groups I said I wanted to put together a one-page document on why, more than ever, manufacturers need to exhibit at our show. I took a compilation of the feedback I got and incorporated it into a one-page document and we sent it out to all of the exhibitors that had cancelled or cut back space. We got back three-quarters of them.

Then, about two weeks before the 2009 show, all these mom-and-pop companies that wanted a 10x10 booth space came out of the woodwork. We didn’t make it all back, but we made enough so it didn’t hurt us that much.

Why are you moving to Louisville in 2011?

We were working on the dates with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and they said 2012 was not looking good. There were a bunch of bi-annual and tri-annual shows that were all hitting on the dates we wanted. They told us these groups were booked as definites and they didn’t have the space for us. I had to start looking somewhere else.

I looked at all the convention centers that had 800,000 to over a million square feet and came up with a very short list—we need contiguous square feet. The list came down to New Orleans and Orlando, which we pulled because of the tropical storm season. Chicago—even now, we still can’t afford the hotels and transportation costs. And the fact that we’d have to use both parts of McCormick Place up and down over Lakeshore Drive, it was going to disjoint it too much. Atlanta, same thing.

The only place left on the list that had that kind of space was Louisville. We went over there and we were blown away. Here, you have a 1.5 million square foot facility that has very few columns, it’s modern, it’s all on one level and it’s across the street from the airport.

What’s the overall revenue of the show?

It’s a little bit higher than $5 million. We give a lot of money back. We give a couple hundred thousand dollars every year to charity.

Also, one of the reasons the show is in existence and has the following it does is because of those retailer groups I mentioned earlier that got displaced by the JPMA show. We have agreements in place with all of the retail trade groups that support this industry that we’ll cover some of their operating income as long as they support the show. These are all buying groups. What we’re doing is paying for some of the overhead of their groups in the agreement that they will send the buyers to the show.

It’s like paying for buyers, but we’re paying their organizations because they were in on the ground floor of this and it’s their trade show as much as everybody else’s.

What percentage of the revenue goes toward that?

Out of the $5 million it’s about $500,000.

EXPO: What happened to JPMA?

They are no longer in the trade show business, they are now part of us. They are an affiliated organization of ours. They are still running a manufacturers association, which is what they’re supposed to be doing, but they are no longer running a trade show. Attendance was dwindling so much it was finally an agreement between us. We still need the manufacturers to have an association, but we don’t really want to be that association. We still want them to exist for that purpose.