As January rolls around, past the holiday festivities, the fence industry starts gearing up for trade show season. Here in New Jersey, the Garden State Chapter of AFA
puts up a really exciting tradeshow and convention in Atlantic City. We are always looking forward to this show as it is local, draws a good attendance and the venue is Harrah's, one of the newer casinos in Atlantic City.

This year was no different. The show was held January 20th and 21st, they had the now famous pool party on Friday night and a pretty well attended trade show on Saturday. We were pleasantly surprised with the number of attendees both at the pool party and on the tradeshow floor. Attendees were optimistic about the upcoming year although some expressed a little sign of softness in demand during the winter months. But, perhaps winter 2021 was an anomaly with the demand spike we all experienced.

AIDI had one booth this year and we were focusing on our Duragates bottom track cantilever hardware, especially the Integrator (internal drive) model with the hidden gear rack. The product drew a lot of attention with some good questions. We are looking forward to helping the industry build better sliding gates with this innovative and heavy duty product range.

Besides that, we had our new 2 piece aluminum cover plates on display. 

As always it was an excellent opportunity to network with familiar faces both customers and vendors. In fact there were several new attendees this year which is heartening to see. New members of our sales team Jose Ortiz and Chris Bedessie got the opportunity to participate at their first trade show and get first hand knowledge of the industry.

Right next to us was one of our supplier vendors Locinox USA with their range of high quality gate locks and closers. Was fun to hang out with them through the weekend.

We are now gearing up for the national fence show FenceTech where the ornamental industry represented by NOMMA joins them with MetalFAB which is their annual convention and tradeshow. The combined show brings over 4000 attendees along with a bunch of fun events. The show will be in Oklahoma City at the convention center. I have never been to Oklahoma City, so I'm looking forward to it !

We will be at booth 1021 displaying our bottom track cantilever hardware, new ornamental forgings and our new Round Ground Track Rolling Gate Hardware. If you haven't done it already, start making plans to attend ! It will be a good show.

Looking forward to seeing many of you soon. Watch out for a link to free passes in your email box. We will send that out soon.