Abbey Archery attends Archery Trade Show in Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Jan 07: The 19 plus hours plane trip to the US to attend the 54th annual Archery Trade Show tests the patience of the best of us. This year, the show was again held in the deep south of the USA, in Atlanta, Georgia between the 18th and 20th January 2007. Atlanta is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the US with just over 5 million people of which 1.1 million have made their home there in the last 10 years. Atlanta is called the Big Peach and is one of only 3 US cities to have hosted the Olympic Games (in 1996) and is the home of Coca Cola, believed to have been a major influence in Atlanta being successful with its Olympic bid; the World of Coca Cola museum is also in Atlanta.

This annual archery event showcases new products and innovations and is the biggest, most important trade event on the archery calendar. (If you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox as your browser, hover your cursor over each image to read the photo captions)

We attended breakfast seminars on a wide variety of archery topics conducted by experts, met our manufacturers and suppliers, some of whom we have been dealing with for 32 years. We saw new products (usually not released on the US market until after the trade show) and assessed their suitability for our Australian market. As well, we tested new bows and equipment to see if these products will hold up under our rugged and harsh Australian conditions. New manufacturers present their offerings at the trade show and hope their new invention will attract sales. The reality is a lot of new ideas are not commercially viable or require further refinement or modification before they will fire up the market. We are always on the look out for innovative products.

The show is held over 3 days in an enormous convention centre - twice as big as any centre we have in Australia, which certainly keeps you fit, being on your feet for 9 hours per day just looking at products! For many years at Trade Shows, Bear Archery displayed from their Fred Bear Museum, a huge mounted bear which had attacked Fred Bear more than 45 years ago and Fred shot the bear with a recurve bow at very close range. This year, the ATA organised a promotion with half a million dollars in prizes, in front of an audience of several thousand dealers, taking place over two hours, with a prize drawn every two minutes, culminating in a grand prize of a pick up truck valued at some US $25,000.00.

We were very pleased to meet our new Abbey Archery Sales Representative for Australia, Ed Wilson, who we invited to the trade show so he could experience the event first hand. Ed and his wife are relocating from Winnipeg, Manitoba, in central Canada, to take up this position with Abbey. We had advertised locally and overseas for our Sales Representative which involves driving our famous Abbey Archery 4.5 tonne truck to visit our network of dealers up and down the east coast of Australia and attend many major archery tournaments and competitions. We are confident Ed will assist archers and our dealers, imparting his wide archery experience and knowledge, built up over many years. We will have more news on Ed shortly.