SUBSTANTIVE MARKET STARS: A quartet of High Point’s celebrated performers will capture the most important attention at the Las Vegas regional trade show

This week the real bright stars shining at the regional Las Vegas Market will be the committed and accomplished business performers from the High Point Market: Brian Casey, High Point Market Authority, Marion Kelly, Showplace, Tim McGee, Merchandise Mart Properties, and Tom Mitchell, International Home Furnishings Center.

Jointly and severely, the business celebrities possess the enduring mercantile star status, quality and gravitas that generates and sustains more influence, status and business to the global industry. Their proven on-stage business performances dramatically eclipse the all-glitz-all-the-time Las Vegas show.

While aging rocker Rod Stewart ushers in another expensive, high rent and rough-cut hulking structure, the presence of High Point’s leading quartet will be singing the strength of real opportunity, not aggrandizing puppy love promises of magnificent platforms.

Messers. Casey, Kelly, Mitchell and McGee benefit from the proximate power of a global industry’s most entrenched creative class of executives, designers, logistical nucleus, warehouse capacity, marketing specialists and more in the North Carolina's dynamic Piedmont Triad, as well as the entire Tar Heel State and neighboring Virginia, the bedrock of the industry.

A new sense of formidable cooperation is enveloping the High Point Market, as outlined in the Business Journal’s current story about Tom Mitchell leading the International Home Furnishings Center. The fresh cooperation will yield greater gains in buyer opportunity, experience and success. Together, and with fellow exhibition buildings in and around High Point, they are working with the Market Authority to smooth rough edges and finding ways to overcome challenges for a lasting transition unlikely in Las Vegas.

Wherever congregated this week at the World Market Center, I can only imagine the magnetic attraction of this quartet standing tall together, conveying the sense of relaxed institutional wisdom, confident cooperation and important cohesion.

The long reach of the Casey-Kelly-McGee-Mitchell authority and credibility grants them an earned right to harmonize about the reality of the most glamorous, rich and accomplished merchandise assortment around, the High Point Market.

Fun and play at regional trade shows pales insignificantly compared to retailers and designers’ overriding need to get the biggest return on their investment in attending strong home furnishings market. Serious retailers attend markets to work.

In the world of home furnishings, the High Point Market with its product abundance and variety always entertains and sustains more retailers than the incomplete in-the-regional-wings Las Vegas Market.

After Rod’s singing and strutting is just a desert memory, the industry again will turn its attention to the High Point Market for substantive leadership and sustainability, and realize the difference between glitzy trade shows and real show business — the High Point Market.

Comments

[doug brackett]

Do believe AMM people have taken over in High Point. Hope they fare better than John Portman's empire.