So far our survey has not detected much interest among Candian screen printers in attending the Long Beach show on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of this month. Various reasons have been mentioned but the most common to date is cost.
We have often pointed out that, in our opinion, the Long Beach show is the premier textile screen printing show in North America. This has been particularly true for a number of years now ever since the emphasis of the SGIA show shifted from a healthy dose of textile screen printing to digital graphics.
Arguments have been made from time-to-time that the shows should perhaps run every second year. In fact, it is our understanding that a few influential individuals in the industry raised the topic with particular reference to the SGIA show a few years ago already. We have also noticed that over the past few years at all the shows a few large manufacturers have scaled back their presence while others have not appeared at all.
The same applies to the shows in Canada which are now considerably smaller than they once were and the focus now is almost exclusively on garments.
But in spite of these changes, we still encourage our Canadian customers to keep abreast of developments in the textile screen printing industry by attending at least one good textile screen printing show at least every couple of years. And, as mentioned before, if you are going to budget to attend only one show and want the best bang for your textile screen printing buck, we suggest that you make it the Long Beach show.
