The Jan. 18-20 session of Bread & Butter in Barcelona was a big success, registering a total of 48,000 passages through the gates as compared to 45,000 for the first event in the city last July. Visitors from Spain and Portugal represented 37 percent of total attendance, followed by the Italians with 18.7 percent and by visitors from the UK and Ireland with 8.5 percent. There were also 1,100 visitors from North America, 995 from Scandinavia, 726 from Turkey and 700 from Greece.
B&B, which hosted some 800 brands in Barcelona and will feature 500 in Berlin later this week, has decided to change its July dates to avoid an overlap with the CPD fashion show starting out in Düsseldorf on July 23. It will be staged in Barcelona on July 5-7 and in Berlin on July 14-16. The last day of the Berlin show will coincide with the ISPO fair in Munich.
The organizers hope that other Berlin shows – B-In, 5th floor, Premium, Berliner Klamotten and Spirit of Fashion – will run simultaneously with Bread & Butter, but it’s not sure yet. Meanwhile, Danielle De Brie has agreed to return to her post as communication manager of the fair after her resignation a few weeks ago.
The glamour around B&B is apparently affecting the more classical and established Pitti Uomo show in Florence, which continues to host a few sports brands. After seven years of uninterrupted growth, the number of buyers registered at Pitti Uomo declined slightly to 27,522 from 27,935 in January 2005, with drops both from Italy and from abroad. At 9,613, foreigners represented a little less than half of the total attendance. Dismissing the new competition from B&B as a factor, the organizers attribute the fall to the reduced number of stores operating in the more developed markets.
On the other hand the Florentine fashion exhibition recorded increases in attendance of 4, 5 and 9 percent from Germany, Spain and Switzerland, respectively. Attendance declined slightly from France, the UK, Holland and China. It went up from Northern Europe, Japan and Korea.
