Think: 'Road Trip'

By the time the airliner I'd ridden from New York touched down in Los Angeles last month, the consternation over the Toy Industry Association's decision to move its annual fall mass market toy preview to Dallas for the first time was just starting to settle down.

Less than a week had passed since we'd broken the news of the move in one of our Playthings Extra email blasts, and already people were moving past "What are we going to do?" and heading steadily towards "Where am I going to stay?" as exhibitors unfamiliar with the particular quirks of the show's new host city began to say goodbye to long-held habits of negotiating one metropolis' ins and outs in favor of looking for bits of insight into how things were done in Big D.

As evidence, day by day the poll question on Playthings.com (which I'll admit is far from scientific) asking people for their feeling about the show's move was beginning to tilt in favor of the positive. The "angry" votes ran out of steam around the 44th percentile and, in the end, more people, collectively, were either "happy" or "didn't care" either way about the move than those who voted in the negative. As for me, I was just glad to be getting away from the steady string of emails and phone calls about the decision—that and the damp and gray of late-winter Manhattan—in exchange for a few days of California sunshine.

I'm mildly embarrassed to say that, despite having covered the toy business on and off since the mid-'90s, I'd never actually been to the Western States Toy & Hobby Show before that day. I'm going to guess that a fair number of other East Coasters haven't been there either (and Midwesterners and Southerners, too, for that matter). In fact, that's kind of the joke about the show…it's a West Coast rep show, everyone will tell you, and they're not lying. That's pretty much all who's there, plus local retailers (although the general consensus among reps was that there were less of those at this year's show too). What was funny (but not actually "ha-ha funny") was that Los Angeles-based manufacturers I would visit during the trip admitted they had never been to the show either, so at least I wasn't the only Pomona newbie.

There were more than 900 manufacturers' lines represented at the show, according to the Western Toy & Hobby Representatives Association, but the actual exhibitor list is small, with a handful of regional rep groups dominating the exhibition floor with the kind of sprawling booths that a large rep firm typically needs to show off its many lines. There were also a few major and mid-size specialty manufacturers with booths of their own, along with a few firms for which this was their very first toy show anywhere. The show itself is 46 years old, so despite its size in comparison to the TIA's much larger events, it must be doing something right. Ask the retailers who attend, and they'll tell you that it does. As one buyer said in response to my asking why he attended: "Because the reps have done all the work for me. They've gone to New York and picked all the best lines so I don't have to."

Pomona's an intimate show in that seemingly everyone knows (and often enough has worked for) everyone else. In that way, it's not any different than any other gathering of toy business people. What is different from the East Coast toy business culture, though, is that the folks out West spend a lot less energy complaining. I think what helps is that the weather's often perfect, which certainly sets a much better tone for a show than the constant will-it-or-won't-it snow discussions in New York every February. People actually want to be there. It was a breath of fresh air to visit a U.S. toy trade show where the focus was on the future—the immediate future of placing orders for this year's lines—versus one where talk invariably turns to how things were always done in the past.

For that reason alone, I'll be glad to head to Dallas for this year's TIA fall mass-market show. Sometimes it's good to get away from business-as-usual when what's usual has turned toxic. Even the closest family can get on each others' nerves when cooped up for too long in the same space. There's nothing like a road trip to bring people together, be it a basketball team, a rock band or an entire business.