Although it’s very easy to find suppliers on e-commerce platforms, traditional exhibitions are not dying out. As a buyer for housewares and storage, attending industry-specific exhibitions can be a great way to find potential suppliers, and stay updated on market trends.
Today we are going to focus on Canton Fair:
Canton Fair (China Import and Export Fair) is held twice year in Guangzhou, China. One is in April, the other in October. It’s the largest trade fairs in the world. Can you imagine the hall is 620000m2 and in each fair, exhibitors still need to be categorized to 3 phrases? This means, for each fair, the exhibition area covers 620000*3=1860000m2.
Many buyers fly from oversea to visit Canton Fair regularly. They can always find what’s needed from the show.
However, here is a tip foreign buyers not really known. It’s probably very hard to find info like this in English world: Canton Fair booths are distributed to each province of China, and government in that province distribute the booths to those companies runs well in their province. This seems to be no problem, however, there are much more need for booth in east and southern provinces than inner land provinces in China. Those who get the booth but don’t really want to attend the show, sell their booth to others. So next time when you are in the fair, please check carefully whether the company name of the booth is the same as the name card you receive. If it’s different, it doesn’t mean you meet a bad supplier or liar, but at least it means they are not qualified to get the booth from formal channel.
As the show is so big, it’s better to get a directory at the information desk before your journey. It helps you easily find the products you need and lead to the hall a certain kind of products are all together.
Usually, in each hall, there are four floors. From ground floor to 2nd floor, are designed, decorated booths which can easily take your attraction. But don’t forget the 4th floor. It’s for standard booth only. But maybe you can find some nice manufacturers there.
Take our Dadi for example, we only get standard booth in 2000s, but after 2015, we can always get bigger booth from government because we have a bigger annual turn over. In last Canton Fair, we got 4 booth and decorated it very well. However, we don’t think we changed a lot with the attitude of working with customers. what I want to say is meeting a good supplier is just same as meeting a good customer, you need a little bit luck and don’t just judge from the appearance.
