Article actual date: Nov 18, 2020

Overview

Intertextile Shanghai Apparel Fabrics is known to be one of the largest and most comprehensive trade fairs for fabrics in China. Ever since it was founded in 1995, this biannual fair has become a leading international meeting point for the best in the textile industry; especially so when China plays such a vast and significant role when it comes to textiles and clothing around the world.

This edition put together a 3-day hybrid exhibition that was held from 23rd September to 25th September 2020. It hosted over 74,000 visitors, and nearly 4,000 exhibitors from at least 20 countries and regions. Throughout this event, sellers were given the chance to showcase their latest innovations and products to an international audience, seek new customers and explore new market opportunities. Buyers were also provided with numerous opportunities to meet sellers both onsite and virtually.

We are proud to be the technology partner chosen for business matching the third edition running. More importantly, this was a great testbed for both the organising team and ourselves to prove our capabilities in powering a hybrid event.

Jublia Hybrid

To fit the event objectives, we designed the hybrid event platform to grant different meeting access tiers to different attendee groups based on ticketing packages (onsite meetings for domestic attendees, virtual and hybrid meetings for international attendees). As such, over 500 virtual and onsite meetings were arranged during the fair through “Connect PLUS” and the VIP business matching programme.

Intertextile was very much a live event and the live event component took centre stage. Our team found it thrilling to be playing an instrumental role in bridging the gap between cross-border attendees who couldn’t meet physically due to the travel restrictions and personal caution.

The solutions deployed for Intertextile include:

Match 360°

Our flagship end-to-end business matching helped to effectively satisfy attendees’ needs across the 5-week event campaign duration. In particular, the material Cotton received the most interest and manufacturers received the most enquiries.

Video Call

All virtual 1-to-1 meetings at the event were powered securely by our proprietary video call technology. There were no issues faced by the majority Chinese-based attendees, and as expected, we saw a 4-times number of virtual meetings made compared to onsite meetings.

E-Marketplace

All of our existing clients stand to benefit from our regular innovations and developments. Intertextile was no exception, and we provisioned a E-Marketplace function to allow a more efficient discovery of products by Buyers and Visitors.

Feedback

This is a great opportunity to find required products and get acquainted with new developments in a Pandemic, without personal presence.

- Rosttextil (Buyer)

The organisation of the hybrid event was done very well. Explanations were clear, the list of sellers were easy to discover. I particularly enjoyed and found relevance in the recommendations. Intertextile’s virtual event platform was really good.

- Textil Doo (Buyer)

Key Takeaways

This experience has further reinforced our knowledge that virtual events cannot (and will never) replace physical events. Nevertheless, virtual events — when designed and formatted correctly — provided a powerful add-on to the physical event component. Having a quadruple number of virtual meetings at a hybrid show tells us that international businesses are still very much active in their search for cross-border collaborations. Organisers need to think creatively about bridging this gap and solving this need. We expect many organisers to follow the lead of Intertextile in their hybrid event plans come 2021. Great work Intertextile!

Speak To Us!

Are you planning for an upcoming hybrid event and are wondering what kind of event formats would best engage your attendees? Not so long ago we released a White Paper on hybrid events. Do check it out here and let us know what you think. We will be more than happy to assist you. Thank you!