GDS’s Spring/Summer ’17 show in Düsseldorf, Germany, has come to a close, and organizers report 740 brands exhibiting to circa-12,500 retailers visiting from all over the globe. The events were held from Tuesday to Thursday—new days that were much appreciated by retailers (who could avoid missing business on Friday, a strong retail-sales day). Attendance, however, was still not to the satisfaction of Werner Matthias Dornscheidt, President and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf. “Neither the sector nor we can be satisfied with this visitor attendance,” he says, adding, “which is why we have decided jointly with the Advisory Board to again intensely consult on the optimization of GDS together with industry and retail over the next few weeks.”
Those in attendance were pleased with the show’s extensive trend platforms with fashion shoes, trend spots and trend talks as well as social media consulting. Over the first two days of the July 2016 GDS, the social media experts of the online magazine Styleranking answered questions in keynote presentations at the FashionBloggerCafé. For more information on trends at GDS, look for the European Trend Report in the September issue of Footwear Plus.
