ATLANTA -- The Atlanta January Market closed its eight-day run on Jan. 17 with an expansive global customer base, record-breaking new-buyer registrations and international attendance increases marking its 60th-anniversary staging, according to Jeffrey L. Portman, Sr., vice chairman, president and chief operating officer.
Atlanta's January advances produced a climate of resurgent business optimism and vitality in the first and largest show of the U.S. winter market season and set the precedent for a radically redefined and reimagined AmericasMart July Market experience, Portman adds.
The January Market reported registration of the vast majority of America's celebrated Top 100 retailers, together with designers, specifiers, online merchants, independent retailers, trend setters, tastemakers and high-profile buying groups from every U.S. state and 81 nations worldwide.
"The buying power and global brands doing business here in January set the new bar for market performanceâ€â€Âhere and everywhere," noted Kim Higgins, AmericasMart Gift & Home Furnishings Advisory Board chairman, and founder and principal of 225 Unlimited. "Customer confidence was strong and sustained across every category and floor. The buyers were here, ready to buy, and they bought big," Higgins added.
With the July 2017 Market opening day less than six months away, market execs said plans are underway for an Atlanta summer show that will give buyers and sellers an experience grounded in the full resources of 'the world's single-largest product mix, newly enhanced with a sweeping multi-media platform, an industry interactive environment offering new engagement with thought leaders and business trend creators and the annual staging of ICON HONORS, among the most important and anticipated night in the home and gift industry'.