Footwear fairs: Madrid aims to emulate Düsseldorf
18/10/2018
Partners FICE and Ifema, respectively Spain’s largest national shoe industry body and Madrid’s main event organiser, have now confirmed a new name, a new format and a new venue for their joint offering for the footwear sector.
Until 2012, Spanish and international footwear buyers faithfully attended Modacalzado twice a year in good numbers. For example, in March 2010, with the cold winds of the economic downturn still biting bitterly in Spain, Modacalzado was still able to attract 300 exhibitors and almost 10,000 visitors.
In 2013 Ifema and FICE stopped running Modacalzado and threw footwear’s lot in with wider fashion exhibition Momad, creating Momad Shoes. At first the footwear element was co-located with Momad, then (from 2016) it took place on separate dates.
After the September 2018, FICE said it thought a cheaper exhibition would suit its member companies better and that is what it has agreed to set up now, still in partnership with Ifema.
A new event, ShoesRoom by Momad, will run for the first time from March 1-3, 2019. The most important changes are that it will be a showroom-style event, allowing footwear brands to show their collections in a smaller, more intimate, more informal and more affordable context.
For this reason, the venue will no longer be Ifema’s Feria de Madrid exhibition site oin the north-east of the Spanish capital. The event will take place instead in La Nave, a site set up in a former elevator factory by the city of Madrid for business and cultural events. La Nave is in the south of the city.
The organisers said they wanted to emulate in Madrid what happened in Düsseldorf, where, until February 2017, footwear professionals flocked to attend GDS twice a year. At that point, fair organiser Messe Düsseldorf announced that it was cutting its ties to the footwear sector, saying GDS was “no longer the right format” for today’s shoe industry.
A smaller event company, Igedo, then successfully launched Gallery Shoes in the Areal Böhler complex in Düsseldorf, a formal industrial site, like La Nave.
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