Courtesy ... Antara Kumar

In conjunction with the 11th International Leather Goods Fair held in 3-5 September, 2005 at ITC Sonar Bangla Hotel, Kolkata, ILPA Trade Show'05 was held on 3rd September, 2005 at Taj Bengal, Kolkata under the Chairmanship of Mr. Tapan Nandi, President, ILPA and Co-chairmen, Mr. Sanjay Barmecha and Mr. Arjun Kulkarni of the Trade Fair Sub-committee of the Association apart from the active role played by Mr. Virendra Singhvi, Vice-President and other Executive Council members of the Association.

The ILPA Trade Show coordinated by M/s. High Life Management and Choreographed by Marc Robinson and lovely featured top Mumbai models like Indrani Dasgupta, Candice Pinto, Deepika Padukone, Carol Gracious and Nethra Raghuraman, apart from other reputed Kolkata model. Moving to the methodology of model turned choreographer Marc Robinson, the model wooed audiences in a Trade Show spread over 10 sequence. A variety of leather products were show cased by models from Mumbai and Kolkata. And these included bags, jackets and leather accessories for men and women.

The best award from Eastern Region was given to M/s. Rajda Industries & Export Pvt. Ltd. and M/s. Shivmani Exports (P) Limited for their stall design and best stall of ILGF'05.

Business reported by the participants amounting to Rs. 11.00 crores which included both export order and domestic business. Export business received from foreign buyers of USA, Finland, Australia, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, UK, Spain and Czech Republic. Most of the participants were happy about the quality of buyers, volume of business negotiated with importers, ambiance and arrangement of the fair including fashion show.

24 buyers from abroad and 5 Indian agents from Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai visited this fair, besides more than thousand business visitors attended this fair from different parts of India. A good number of foreign buyers found that first time visitors for this fair were quite satisfied about the arrangement of the fair, products displayed and quality of participants. Some of them even commented it as an excellent fair. Others, who either visited this fair earlier or have some business with local manufacturing units have made the positive remarks about the fair. However, most of the foreign buyers suggested bigger attendance of leather goods manufacturer in the next fair. According to them the size of the fair is very very small. Majority of the foreign buyers also mentioned that they may be visited this fair next time in their own if information is received well in advance and the number of participants of leather goods manufacturing unit increase.

In view of above it is felt that action plan should be worked out immediately as well as work should be distributed to different agencies like CLE, ILPA, Freya and ITPO to make the next ILGF a real successful event in all sense.