Did any rodbuilders attend last years Washington PA sportsmans show? There was supposed to be a few rodbuilding vendors and/or manufacturers there. If so - how many and who? Was it worth the trip? Is this years show supposed to include rodbuilding again? More?

What's the scoop??

Rog

The rod building portion was a bust and that's putting it mildly. There's a lot more to having a successful rod building show than just announcing that you're going to have one. Barry and Chuck took it on the chin on that one, but learned a valuable lesson.

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I live in the area & have been to that show. It has always been more of of a hunter's show. Bow & Turkey hunting are big in the area. Most fishers wait for the Summerset NJ fly fishing show or drive to Harrisburg for the big monster-sized show out there. Fly and tackle shops are having a hard time surviving around Philly these days.

Tim

After hearing that they were going to have a rod building show there, I drove the roughly 140 miles from just outside Washington, DC to the Washington, PA location and I can tell you that I wasn't a happy camper once I got inside and found out that there weren't any rod building dealers there. Now there may have been some fly shops there that had a little bit of rod building stuff, but it couldn't have been much. I didn't see anything along the lines of rod building items and I looked pretty hard.

I drove there because it was closer than Charlotte and I figured I could see at least something similar. To be honest I felt cheated and think the show promoters should have removed the "Rod Building" heading from their website for that event once they knew that there weren't going to be any rod building supply dealers there.

I can sympathize with you, but the show promoters weren't trying to bamboozle anyone - they just made an honest mistake.

After the huge success of the first Rod Builders Show in Charlotte, Barry and Chuck got the idea that there was this great new market just waiting to turn out and display and attend similar events all over the country. I cautioned them but they decided to give it a try anyway. As you found out, there were no rod building supply vendors there nor did many rod builders attend.

The problem is that while there are hundreds of thousands of rod builders, they're pretty spread out across North America. There is no single geographic location where you can plop down such a show and expect to draw a good crowd for your vendors from that particular regional market alone. There is no area of this country that is even remotely dense with rod builders - we're scattered out pretty thinly. To get the kind of turn out that is required to keep vendors happy, you have to draw attendees from a large area - many hundreds and hundreds of miles away. And to do that, you have to have one heck of a show on tap. Not many people are going to drive or fly from 500 to 1,000 or more miles out to just to see a few seminars or to see 5 or 6 rod building supply booths. And for each dealer in attendance, I figure you need at least 120 to 150 rod builders to attend in order to make it worth their while (sales, profits, all that stuff). It's a very delicate balancing act.

Chuck asked me to work with them on a similar show in PA this year. I won't. There's no point. Charlotte is already established as the premier rod building event and to compete with it is folly, in my opinion. At best, I could pull some vendors and attendees out of Charlotte and have them in PA. And if I worked really, really hard on the PA event, at best we'd end up with what would be two very mediocre shows. Same thing with the event we had hoped to do in CA this year. I've watched this happen with other craft shows and it's not hard to see why so many of them consolodate their efforts into a single, large scale event rather than several smaller ones.

The other main problem, is what I stated above - promotion is more than just announcing that you're having a show. It takes many, many long hours and plenty of money to pull off a really successful rod building event - at least if you're talking about the size show that can draw people from long distances. And if you don't draw them from long distances, you won't get enough attendees there to keep the vendors happy. And... unhappy vendors don't return, making subsequent events less likely to entice the builders to attend.


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I think the same outfit puts on the fly fishing show near my old stomping grounds around Seattle. Because I was visiting family last year at the time they were having the show I arranged to be there the weekend of the show. It was also promoted as having a rod building "section." But unlike in Pennsylvania there actually were some rod building manufacturers and dealers there. Maybe 6 or 7? Something like that. It was worth it to me because I only had to drive less than 40 miles to attend. If I had traveled much farther though, I'd have been @#$%&.