The London Bike Show

If you don't know already, here at PromoLab we are great lovers of cycling (In particular MTB) and the outdoors! So when the London Bike Show (LBS) was on at the excel between Feb 16th - 19th we decided to pop along and see what it was all about.

We were quite taken back by the sheer size of the show at first, however we hadn't realised that LBS had been actually tagged along with the Triathlon Show, Dive Show & The Adventure & Camping Outdoor Show. So not only was there a wide range of Bike themed stands for us to browse but lots on camping, swimming, running & scuba diving! There was even a mini velodrome to test your speed against other riders - pretty cool!

Whats this got to do with merchandise you ask...? Sipping on "à Bloc" beers as we watched stump jumpers perform 360 jumps, back flips & tail whips over the "Air to the Throne" jump park, we discussed what we would do to attract more visitors to our stand. We were there on a weekday which ultimately meant the show was going to be quieter, however we had noticed a lot of stands seemed pretty quiet, whereas others had lines of people queuing! Obviously some stands will always be more popular just for being so different. The "Tannus" stand for example, promoting their unique solid bike tyres was gaining a huge amount of interest. (We thought these were perfect to save our director from all the flats he gets from riding his single speed through the city!) However two of the stands that we were drawn to the most were Karcher & Jack Wolfskin.

The Karcher stand were promoting their new mobile cleaning product, the OC3. We loved this product that enables you to clean your bike, boots or whatever items you've managed to get dirty on your adventure before you threw everything back into the car. It's defo now on this years xmas list! They were giving away an awesome "Orange Bikes" mountain bike, which meant it drew people to the stand for their chance to win whilst allowing the staff to inform the interested parties about their products.

The Jack Wolfskin section of outerwear were handing out codes to people to test it on their safe. There was a huge queue of people lining up to try and crack the safe to win the Jack Wolskin jacket that was inside. Not only that, the many people whose code didn't unlock the safe still walked away with either a branded pen or branded lanyard (We took the lanyard!) Just another simple way of attracting customers to their stand, everyone loves a branded promotional product giveaway. They really do work in attracting potential customers to your stands at events and trade shows.

We loved seeing "Bikspoke" and "Lexham Insurance" giving away their branded merchandise, attracting more customers to their stands than others at the show.

Two other areas of interest was Kodak's 360 degree camera, and the whole section on e-bikes. Technology really is taking over and was definitely one of the busier areas of the show. We loved seeing the use of Virtual Reality starting to make its way into the cycling arena and look forward to seeing how companies may use these tools to help sell their products throughout 2017.