Welcome to Catharine Esmat, who joins the Winchester office. Catharine is an experienced editor / copywriter, with a cv that includes spells as a Senior Editor at Longman and Communications Manager at BT Syntegra. She also speaks French, Italian and Arabic.
Her email is catharine@clearlinecommunications.co.uk and you can reach her on the usual number.
Always our favourite show - everyone’s there, and a lot of business gets done. Matt arrived a day earlier to attend the distributor conference for Nexus Marine AB - a great opportunity to catch up with their distributors from around the world and get a feel for current conditions in their local markets. After that it was into the main show, with the usual round of press calls plus gallons of coffee with clients past, present and hopefully future.
Again, generally a good vibe with our counterparties reporting good sales / strong interest in new product lines, and the sheer size of the show demonstrates just how much the leisure marine industry has expanded and matured over the past decade. Assuming we can weather the problems of sub-prime debt, collapsing banks and a weak dollar, the industry should be in good shape for next year!
We attended the Ft Lauderdale Boat Show at the end of October in support of a number of our clients, and came away feeling optimistic, particularly with regard to the superyacht end of the market. The show was as vast as always, but rather wet as the rain came down pretty relentlessly at the beginning. As the marquees were sited in a dish shaped car park they started taking on water, and we soon found ourselves padding across soggy carpets and doing our best to avoid the deeper puddles.
The UK presence was pretty good, with some nice looking stands grouped together in a British zone, and the buzz was consistent. The bulk of the action though was outside, despite the rain, with big sportsfishing boats as far as the eye could see.
In short, a great show, and we’ll certainly be back next year.
