Phew! We're back from a whirlwind trip to Chicago.

It all started last Saturday when I reconnected with fellow small store owners from across the country at a pre-show half-day meeting. The meeting gathers together a range of specialty cookware shops representing a cross-section of the industry.

Some stores (The Brooklyn Kitchen in New York, Hills Kitchen in D.C.) are like us – small and urban. Others, like are a bit different. Take Crystal Crate and Cargo, for example. They're in a small town in Northwest Michigan with a resident population of around 300 people! In addition to the store, they offer 3 rooms to rent upstairs, should you ever be in town visiting the famous Point Betsie Lighthouse. Most shops are similar in size to our 1200 square feet, but some are quite a bit larger. William Glen in Sacramento, occupying a whopping 35,000 square feet, is one of the largest.

Despite the variation, we always find common ground to exchange ideas, brainstorm solutions to common concerns, and share success stories. It's always a lot of fun, and this year was no exception.

Sunday morning Marthaluz and I joined up and headed to the Housewares Show, the reason for our visit. The show consists of three halls. The North hall shows off cleaning and storage products, the Lakeside hall has mostly electrics, and South hall offers just about everything else for the kitchen. There are thousands of vendors, and we spent Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday working our way up and down the aisles in search of products that would be a good fit for the shop.

We shop a trade show much like you'd shop at Cooks Boulevard, but with couple significant differences:

First, at a shop like ours we've done the hard work to narrow down our offerings from the vast array of available products. At the show, the selection has not been edited at all (this is why it takes 3 giant halls to show all the products!). Vendors generally show their entire lines. Instead of seeing just a selection of Le Creuset, for example, we saw almost everything they offer. In addition, most vendors in any particular category are represented at the show. There far more vendors in each category than you'd see in even the largest of shops. Over 50 companies were offering knives, for example.

The other big difference between you shopping at Cooks Boulevard and us shopping at the show is the people. The show gives us access to people who you (and we) don't have access to at our shop. We can ask the hard questions about products and get specific information from the folks who actually make the products. For example:

• We spoke with a product designer who designs products for Cuisipro and he explained why they'd made various design decisions about their new new herb saver and other products.
• We got our tour of Emile Henry's new products from Jacques Henry, the fifth generation family member to run Emile Henry.
• We made a product suggestion to Robert, the CEO of Harold Import Company, from whom we get a wide variety of products.
• Shawn, one of the two women who run CDN (the other is her mom, Jan), sat down with us to explain what happened to the digital Quick-tip thermometer that we like so much. (short story: the factory abruptly closed)

This contact is invaluable to us. We can get far more information in a short amount of time than we'd ever get via emailing or phoning a company, and we can talk to people other than the front-line customer service folks who we usually speak with.

We made pages and pages of notes on all of the products we saw. Over the next few weeks we'll need your help deciding which ones we should bring into the shop. We'll be blogging and looking for your comments. There's a lot of new stuff, so get ready!

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Image Credits:
Ken Kee courtesy chicagounzipped4
Houseware show courtesy Oscar Einzig