ATA Trade Show Celebrates 20 Years of Growth

By Justin Stakes

New Ulm, MN -(AmmoLand.com)- When the 2016 ATA Trade Show opens Jan. 5 in Louisville, Kentucky, it will mark the 20th anniversary of the archery and bowhunting industry’s chief business and social event, which annually draws about 9,500 retailing, manufacturing and marketing professionals.

The 2016 ATA Trade Show will play host to 615 exhibitors, who booked a record 229,000 square feet of booth space. In other words, you’d need four NFL football fields, laid goal post to goal post, to accommodate just the Show’s booths, minus the aisles. In fact, if you crammed all those booths on the 4.5-acre flight deck of the USS Harry S. Truman, you’d still need half of a football field for the spillover.

The Show’s roots, however, are more modest. The Archery Trade Association was known as the Archery Manufacturers and Merchants Organization (AMO) when it held its first trade show in January 1997.

That inaugural show, also held in Louisville, attracted 6,000 attendees. And, while AMO owned the show, the organization and its staff did not yet manage show operations. Those services were provided by private contractors from 1997 to 2002. Therefore, the industry had …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand