Things happen there

At the forthcoming spoga+gafa an internationally curated trend show for the garden furniture segment will be staged for the first time with a number of product islands. The curators are industry experts from the fields of design, retail, universities and trend research. The Trend Islands will be on show not only at spoga+gafa, but also at the international furniture fair imm cologne next spring. This news was announced by Katharina C. Hamma, chief operating officer of Koelnmesse, at a press conference in mid-May.
A new special presentation features also in the garden care segment. In addition to the focus already announced on soils, turf, fertilisers, substrates and plant protection, the IVG Power Place Green is returning with a number of returnee exhibitors. (IVG is the Industrieverband Garten, the German manufacturers' association in the garden market.) The presentation completes the combined exhibition format introduced in 2017 with the IVG Power Place Battery and the Smart Gardening World. These two platforms have grown by 50 per cent compared with last year. The overall exhibition floor space of spoga+gafa is increasing by 5 000 m² to 230 000 m². "98 per cent of the exhibition area is already booked," said Hamma. More than 2 100 exhibitors are expected from around 60 countries.
Hamma drew positive conclusions on the whole from the innovations introduced last year. "Things happen at spoga+gafa," she said. "The green industry notices that. We notice it."
At the press conference, the organisers of the garden trade show underlined their intention to engage even more closely with the trends theme. The trend hunter Manuel Rucar of the French agency Chlorosphere was invited to speak. His trend outlook for 2019 is based on the concept of "realness", perhaps one of the "most fundamental and most forgotten principles in today's society," according to his analysis. A new way of consumer thinking will therefore reorient us to "what is substantial, reality, and true".
For some this is a little too insubstantial. Importantly the press conference did not make it clear how important the garden segment is for DIY stores. According to the European DIY store association Edra, garden ranges account for "at least 20 per cent" of the overall sales of DIY stores. At the same time, Edra general secretary John Herbert is in no doubt about how important the trade show is from the association's perspective: "spoga+gafa is the fair that is most well frequented by association…