SHOESSTAR celebrates its first anniversary - 5 years

In the 2017 year, the SHOESSTAR International Regional Exhibition of Shoe Project marks 5 years. The project involves shoe manufacturers from 22 countries, representing products of more than 200 brands.

The plans for the development of the exhibition are told by its director, Alexandra Sakaeva.

What are the advantages of your format?

The main goal of our project is to enable manufacturers and distributors to present their new collections to owners of retail chains and stores in various regions of Russia: in the Far East, in Western and Eastern Siberia, in the Urals, in the south of Russia, in the Crimea, and also in Kazakhstan.

Each regional exhibition has its own specifics, formed on the basis of accumulated experience and statistics of inquiries from local customers. For retail shoe chains and stores, the advantages are a unique opportunity to get in direct contact with manufacturers, agree on supplies and logistics. At each exhibition, we conduct free training seminars for representatives of chains and stores.

What original solutions do you offer?

For manufacturers who want to bring to the market a new brand or line of new products, we offer the organization of personal presentations and surveys of potential customers to assess the degree of interest.

There is a “Defile of shoe novelties” on the opening day of exhibitions, this is a good tool for presenting brands. From time to time, we collect round tables with the participation of leading Russian and foreign industry experts.

How are you doing with innovation?

In 2017, we introduced several services: a round-the-clock hotline that automatically determines the region where the client is calling from and transfers to the employee responsible for this exhibition (with a large difference in time zones in Russia this is very important); electronic registration system; SHOESSTAR special mobile application.

What determines the choice of cities for the exhibition?

The SHOESSTAR project took off in the 2011 year, from the first exhibition in the Urals. Then we still did not know whether the participants of the exhibition would have a result, how the Ural shoe retail would react. But in the end, it was decided not only to repeat the exhibition next season, but also to add the Far East, Kazakhstan. And gradually we came to what is today: Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Alma-Ata, Krasnodar and Simferopol. Most of our participants, long before us, worked in these regions, gathering their clients in show rooms, at presentations. Our project has grown just from this, because it is much more convenient for everyone to gather on the same date, on the same site, in their competitive environment, and most importantly, it is convenient for all shoe buyers to come 1 once to one place and get acquainted with the new collection. Our task, as organizers, is to create conditions for them to work.

Tell us about your development plans ...

The next two years we will develop the existing exhibitions. The first shoe retail exhibition of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Iran will be organized in Baku in September 2017, a unique opportunity to promote their brands in the Caucasus and Middle East markets. We began to publish a directory of shoe companies in Russia and Kazakhstan “SHOESWORLD. Shoes from A to Z. ” So far, it is being published only in hard copy with the circulation of 5 000 copies and is distributed free of charge at all our exhibitions, as well as at EUROSHOES. Now we are going to translate it into an electronic version so that all shoe makers can quickly find the necessary information on the Internet.