The American edition of Sporting Goods Intelligence reports that the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market, the big outdoor show in Salt Lake City, is heading towards a new schedule where it should take place in the first week in August, starting in 2010, instead of the third week of July. OR's organizer, Nielsen Business Media, is taking proactive steps to embrace the paddle sports segment and keep it from starting its own sport-specific show as was threatened in July. Among them, it is offering to set up a large display area for boats at a major discount; initiation of a study to examine shipping and logistics methods for paddle sports firm to help increase cost-effectiveness; providing a matching grant to the Outdoor Industry Association to continue their efforts at unifying and providing leadership in the paddle segment and the creation of a more visible and defined location for paddle sports at the front of the exhibit hall with new visual branding and merchandising components. Nielsen’s new policy toward the paddle sports industry is a reaction to an announcement by Canoe and Kayak Magazine that it wants to organize a show to be held in Minneapolis in September 2010. The American debate on what to do with the kayak brands is reminiscent of what happened in Europe around the turn of the millennium when paddlesports-related apparel brands put pressure on the organizers of the OutDoor show in Friedrichshafen to bring the dates of the show forward into July. The result was that the paddle people were unhappy and pulled out of Lake Constance. Today, the canoe business has a fairly well functioning specialty trade show, Kanumesse, which is held in Nuremberg in early September.
