Home and Buyers Festival – Where Discerning Retailers Learn and Buy 

The Home & Gift Buyers Festival brings buyers and exhibitors from varied areas for four days to Harrogate International Centre along King’s Road in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The 2016 event will run from July 17th to July 20th. The products to be showcased include glassware, kitchen accessories, interior products, bags, rings, scarves, necklaces, jewellery and fashion, and giftware. Most of these products are from Home Textiles, Home Furnishings, Handicrafts and Consumer Appliances.

What awaits you?

At The Home & Gift Buyers Festival, visitors will discover one of the most comprehensive and better ways of carrying out their business in the most friendly manner. Each year in July, the festival brings together thousands of new and trendy product launches. Those with stores who want them to stand out as much as possible during the busiest seasons and after that will have their desires met. The festival takes place in a beautiful and appealing town known as Harrogate. It hosts thousands of exhibitors across five main edited sectors from fashion and jewellery, gift, greetings and stationery, new designers, to interiors.

The festival introduced a new component in 2015 known as the Great Northern Retail Summit Forum. Presented at the event are an array of inspiring launches of new products and lots of advice on retail taking place in England’s most unique sociable atmospheres. The educational and inspirational content programme brings together industry experts ready to give attendees practical advice to grow their businesses in a changing and competitive world.

The Home & Gift Buyers Festival in a nutshell

Apart from providing visitors with an exceptional opportunity to buy products, thousands of products will make the impending seasons the most profitable with a diverse range of popular, favourite and new products from more than 850 brands present. About 240 brands that are new to the festival have enrolled in the festival for the 2016 event for the first time.

The festival offers a chance for attendees to learn from the crème de la crème of the industry, experts sourced from diverse professional and expert areas at the Great Northern Retail Forum. Lots of retail insight, priceless knowledge hitherto unknown by many, is now on the menu, particularly in the 2016 event where experts will include John Lewis from Google, among others.

The show is unique and probably one you might remember for ages due to the buying experience presented. Organisers define it as combining your day’s work in the sun with the most appealing BBQ. Some’ve been attending the event for about eight years in a row to enjoy the lovely environment, great people from all walks of life, expert advice and make great business deals.

Show sectors

• Giftware

One of the most popular show sectors in the Home & Gift Buyers Festival is Giftware. It’s not just the largest of the sectors in the event but also offers lots of things people need all the time, from design-led, contemporary, and quirky to traditional gifts. There’s a likelihood of finding those perfect products you need to replenish your store across the marquees and halls of the event. Some of the exhibitors in this sector include Alice Caroline, Artcuts, Dartington Crystal, ECP Design, Joe Davies and Febland Group, among others.

• Jewellery and Fashion

Whatever online or in-store items you need, the event probably has more than you need. This sector contains all the chic, casual, classic and contemporary articles of fashion and jewellery you can think of. There’re well-established and new brands exhibiting their products, from bags, scarves, necklaces, rings, and assorted accessories, among others, to provide the most fantastic and vast range to select from. Some brands include Elrand, Abbacino, Tempest Designs, Melissa McArthur Jewellery, Cool Trade Winds and C’est Beau Bags.

• Interior and Accessories

Those intending to furnish their stores with the most beautiful interior product collections will find this sector appealing. Halls will always be filled with lots of items fit for the interior, from glassware, kitchen accessories, and candles to cushions. Some brands in this category include Baa Stool, Hill Interiors, Creative Tops, Voyage Decoration, Culinary Concepts and Tweedmill Textiles. The Harrogate event allows you to plan through the provided exhibitor list to maximise your time at the festival by finding what you wish to fast.

• Greetings and Stationery

Stores searching for perfectly designed greeting cards and creative stationery in vast arrays will find it here. Exhibiting brands include Leonard Smith, Amy Louise Design, Two Little Boys, Pink Pig, Jessica Hogarth Designs, and Megan Claire. These include slogans, patterns and prints, including artists, licenses and occasional content on display at the event. Many accompanying notebooks include gift wraps, pens, calendars, diaries and many other unique stationery.

• The Great Northern Retail Forum

Considering every Home & Gift Buyers Festival attendee has left their precious stores and taken time to be at the event, making every moment worth it is critical. One of the ways of accomplishing this is by attending the Great Northern Retail Forum, which many who last participated in the festival in 2014 might not be familiar with. Introduced in 2015, the three-day forum blends expert advice and inspiration from keynote speakers and experts such as Tom Kerridge and John Lewis.

Even if you don’t want to remain in the forum for a long time, the schedule and timetable easily allow you to choose which talk to attend that could impact your business forever. For the 2016 event, keynote speakers include Katherine Owen Fowler from John Lewis Partnership York and a DM Fashion and VM, Tom Kerridge, renowned TV host and expert chef and Google’s Retail Industry Manager David Green.

Others include Warren Knight, an author and social media strategist, Jenny Spivey, a small business and retail consultant and Tile Fire Ltd founder Andrew Cousins; Laura Perryman, a materials and colour design and insight and trends forecaster; Yeshen Venema, a photographer, web consultant and filmmaker among a dozen more.

Home & Gift Buyers Festival is organised by Clarion Events Ltd, which creates a platform for buying events for all retailers and organising e-commerce events for diverse professionals and multichannel retailers.