Business relationships are, and will remain, at the heart of this fair, but we are convinced that an event such as ours can also become an important opportunity for gathering information about the market and new potential commercial horizons.  As a matter of fact, new collectives of manufacturing companies participated in Expo Riva Schuh for the first time, from Russia, Bulgaria and South Africa.  The information is strategic in this sense: for this reason, we organised a special occasion dedicated to the South African market, which may still be limited in numbers, but which has excellent growth prospects and can provide an interesting frontier for the near future.  Likewise, our inaugural session was created with this in mind, the idea being to provide an overview of the world of distribution and on the present and future scenarios.  Scenarios that are increasingly tied into the online channel, a channel that Expo Riva Schuh would like to use to offer a permanent fair year-round: the digital world, in fact, is fundamental for a fair like ours, providing also strong instruments for targeting both exhibitors and visitors.

At Expo Riva Schuh, we have reached an optimal ratio between the number of exhibitors and buyers who visit the fair.  Among the visitors, we registered an increasing number of new professionals, very often related to the development of e-commerce.  Even some high-end producers attend our event in search of partnerships for the development of their samples and collections.  They are all new categories of professionals joining the ranks of the historic public of Expo Riva Schuh, which, today, is a fair that genuinely represents the entire footwear supply chain with numbers that speak for themselves:  11,224 professional visitors in four days coming from 100 countries; and 1,464 exhibitors, of which 290 were Italian.