Trade Shows, Retailers Got a Brand-New Bag
Trade shows and retailers increasingly find marketing opportunities and ways to build credibility with bags.
In the sharp-elbowed world of trade-show marketing, part of any customer’s experience is in the bag. Or, more accurately, on it.
“At one time, people just put logos on bags. Now they must be works of art,” said Ron Raznick, president of New York–based RTR Bag & Co.
Whether they’re carried by retail shoppers or trade-show attendees, branded shopping bags can be a mini-billboard and a way to prove environmental credibility.
For Ron Lindman of Packaging Services Corp., bags for the fashion business are becoming a bigger part of his company’s sales.
Fashion retail makes up more than half of Packaging Services Corp.’s business. In the future, the Madison Heights, Mich.–based company forecasts, fashion bags will make up 80 percent of its business, which includes the manufacturing of bags, boxes, ribbons and tissues. In March, Packaging Services opened its West Coast office in the lobby of the California Market Center showroom building in downtown Los Angeles to boost its fashion retail clientele, such as Fred Segal, Kitson and Madison. A well-designed shopping bag carries a certain level of prestige, Lindman said. “It’s all about image.”
The manufacturing of bags remains a competitive, domestic business, taking on a higher profile at trade shows.
Since the March run of the Los Angeles Fashion Market, RTR has exhibited its luxe bags and packaging in a temporary showroom at the Cooper Design Space. Until recently, the company showcased its fabric and leather-like bags, made out of a heavy paper, by partnering with the Project trade show in Las Vegas, which distributed thousands of Project-branded RTR bags to attendees at the show. At trade shows, bags are a way to build the show’s name. Everyone needs a bag to carry catalogs, notebooks, T-shirts and other stuff while walking the show.
A well-designed bag bearing a trade-show logo gives a trade show an edge in the marketing battle, said Jason Bates, co-founder of the Class trade show, which is set to run May 12–13 in Hollywood.
Class falls during a lull in the trade-show calendar, so the show limits its branded bags to VIPs attending the show. But when show dates overlap, the bag branding becomes competitive, Bates said.
“In New York and Las Vegas, there is the battle of the bags,” he said. “They want to let everybodyknow that you came to their show.”
Another California-based fashion trade show, Agenda, takes a different angle. It distributes more than 4,000 reusable bags at its shows in Southern California and New York. Made of Dupont’s Tyvek fabric by Burbank, Calif.–based Earthwise Bag Company Inc., Agenda’s bags have straps on all sides. “You can wear it as a backpack,” said Aaron Levant, president of Agenda.
PR on the shop floor For retailers, shopping bags are one of the best tools for public relations and customer relations. When a celebrity is photographed carrying a boutique’s bag, it is a public-relations coup for the retailer, said Karen Meena, vice president of the Ron Robinson Fred Segal boutique, with locations in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif.
Changing a bag’s graphic and the way it is manufactured can create valuable credibility with customers, according to Ron Robinson, owner and chief executive of Ron Robinson Fred Segal. After the Great Recession hit in the fall of 2008, Robinson changed the logo on his bags to represent a new design, reminiscent of the colors of a dawn break. “We could not look the same going through this downward trend. People were rejecting what was out there. People were rejecting stagnancy,” he said.
