Getting in Ship-Shape

For heavy apparel industry machinery, no domestic apparel trade show can top SPESA Expo. Held in Miami every three years (in rotation with Germany’s IMB and Japan’s JIAN), SPESA Expo brings together 350 exhibitors from 23 countries in 350,000 square feet of exhibition space to showcase everything from sewing machines to 20-foot-long, 30,000-pound cutters.

In the wrong organizational hands, disaster clearly looms, but the task hardly fazes Tony Calanca of Connecticut-based Infinity Expo Group, who handles logistics for SPESA Expo.

He walked us through the process: You have to deal with two areas: pre-show and on-site. Pre-show, you engage a freight forwarder. That person should have offices or agents in countries we need coverage on. You can use my official freight forwarder, who has a trade-show bond, which makes it easier for you, or whomever you want. Let’s say there’s a piece of machinery in France. The owner of that machinery has to have it crated, or just skidded, which is raised up and secured to a platform.

Once it is crated, you have to get it on a truck to the point of shipment. Machinery usually comes via water; it’s not expensive, but it is slow. Even the machinery from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan comes through the port of Miami. The freight forwarder has to determine how much container space he needs, and must time the shipments to have plenty of time to get them through U.S. Customs. There’s not so much national security issues with apparel industry gear. If your stuff is from England, France, Germany, there won’t be a problem. Chinese, the government pays particular attention to those guys. You need to leave a margin of three or four days for customs.

It can take a week, or as little as a day. Then the machinery sits at the port until it is needed. On-site, it’s a different skill set than shipping. The freight forwarder has to sit with the show’s general services contractor. He provides the forklifts and the men and the labor. You tell him what you have coming in, and he makes up the schedule for the move-in. The freight forwarder stays in contact with the drayage contractor, who takes the machinery off the truck at the loading dock and places it in your booth. You tell him the piece count, the piece description. If I say I have an 80,000-pound piece, then he has to rent a crane. The largest thing we had at SPESA was a 30,000-pound cutter. We needed two very big forklifts for that.

Most of the other pieces were 4,000 pounds to 8,000 pounds—not that overwhelming, but you have to be really careful with that. The machinery is then trucked to the convention center according to the schedule, and removed the same way. It’s really not that difficult. Honestly, the biggest difficulty we have is people logistics, not machinery logistics.

With the State Department taking a stricter look at who they let in the country, we’ll have a Chinese company’s machinery here but get phone calls from the Chinese exhibitors saying they haven’t gotten their visas.