BPA Baby & Child offered a huge variety of products which was fantastic for retailers and many of the show’s regular exhibitors reporting their best show ever.

Paul Hillary of Haptic (Taggies,) commented: “This is our fifth successive show as we’ve exhibited at BPA Baby & Child since 2005. By day two, the show proved to be our best trade show ever in terms of orders – including Kind + Jugend, Cologne, Bubble, Premier Kids and Top Drawer.

“It has been the biggest show, not just in terms of orders, but has opened 15 new accounts for us, plus range reviews with two key customers. The quality of the visitor this year was excellent. We saw a lot of London and South East visitors who simply prefer London.”

Andrew Ratcliffe from Dorel noted: “In all the talk of a recession we were pleased with attendance and there was a real buzz at the show.  It was great to see a queue of customers waiting to see our sales team. “

There were a record number of new companies exhibiting this year, which not only reported a high level of interest in their products, but many also commented on the great networking opportunities and outstanding support from both the BPA and other exhibitors.

Natasha Poffley from Piccolo Lusso, said: “Thank you to everyone at the BPA for helping to make the show a great success for us. We had a huge amount of interest from retailers for our Chic ‘o’ bello changing bags and the orders taken during the show reflect this. We also have numerous enquiries to follow up now we are back at the office. The support and advice we were given by everyone involved at the BPA made it very easy for us to organise our debut into the UK.”

As always, there was an electric atmosphere on the first day of the show, as the companies short-listed for the prestigious BACRA awards waited in anticipation while the judges perused their products prior to declaring the winners. This was followed by an air of euphoria throughout the rest of the show as the winning companies proudly displayed their trophies

The Concept & Innovation stand was a hive of activity throughout the entire three days, with the short-listed and winning products attracting a huge amount of interest from retailers and distributors alike. Like its predecessor ‘The Wean Machine’, it will undoubtedly be sooner rather than later that this year’s winning product – Chillipeeps – will be hitting retailers’ shelves.

Social media and Search Engine Optimisation are definitely the hot topics of the times and two seminars, which ran throughout the duration of the show, received a huge amount of interest from both visitors and exhibitors. Site Wizard gave tips and advice on how to get your website to the top of Google Search Engines, while Effectivate explained how sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to market your brand. Because of their popularity, these topics will definitely be on the agenda for next year’s show.

Peter White, BPA chief executive, commented: “Now that exhibitors and visitors have expressed their preference for London, BPA will certainly be taking this on board when investigating options and ideas for its show next autumn. We will also continue to focus on innovation and new product launches, as well as informative seminars which have proved immensely popular this year.”

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