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Pet Fashion Week New York 2009

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Camilla Vitale's (center) Blue Rocket Sales booth remained busy throughout much of the show.

I attended Pet Fashion Week New York this weekend, and though it’s already been two days since the end of the show, I’m still having trouble coming up with a solid way to describe it. Exhibitor attendance was way, way down. Last year there were about 150 exhibitors at the show. This year there were 39; four of those were publishers and two were non-profit organizations, leaving only 33 exhibitors for buyers to visit at the show. This sounds like a bad thing, but from what I heard from some of the exhibitors, it wasn’t such a negative thing for them.

Derek DiFante, who organizes the annual show with the help of his father (and grooming world veteran extraordinaire) Mario DiFante, stopped by the Pet Style News booth on Sunday and told me 500 buyers had been at the show on Saturday. It was slower on Sunday, but he was hoping for an afternoon rush. From my observation, a rush didn’t come, but there were buyers on the floor pretty steadily and most of the exhibitors looked pretty busy all day. What that meant for the exhibitors was more attention since buyers weren’t in a hurry through in an effort to see everyone.

When I picked up my badge on Sunday morning, I asked a Pet Fashion Week staffer how the numbers had been so far. He told me the show had been “intentionally scaled down this year,” which sounded like a talking point from management to me. To be sure, the absence of the fashion show and grooming show was planned in advance, which does constitute a deliberate scaling down, but I have strong doubts that the organizers intentionally kept the number of exhibitors below 40.

What was very encouraging to me was the fact that a number of new boutique owners were walking the show and the ones with whom I spoke were not only positive about their experiences in the business so far, but also optimistic about the future. The two who visited me at the booth agreed that their positive feelings may have something to do with the fact that they weren’t around for the “boom” and are working from a zero point of “bust” which means the only direction to go is up.

In any case, my humble opinion is that a few of the exhibitors I had heard canceled at the last minute probably missed out on some business at Pet Fashion Week, but I can certainly understand their decisions based on the number of exhibitors at the show. While things came together well for the most part for those who did exhibit this year, I can’t help but wonder whether buyers will be as likely to attend such a small show next year. Here’s hoping Pet Fashion Week organizers can pull together an event next year that more closely resembles the previous, highly successful ones. I do hope they’ll bring back the fashion show, too, since that brought much of the glamour and glitz (not to mention members of the media).

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