Surf Expo History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Surf Expo is the longest-running trade show for the board, beach and fashion industries - the twice-yearly, trade-only marketplace where manufacturers and retailers in the surf, skate, water sports, swim and resort industries have done business since 1976. It traces its beginnings to a 1975 board meeting of the Eastern Surf Association, when a group of ambitious sales reps rented rooms in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to show their lines to the buyers gathered for the meeting. The following year Ross Houston, a board member, decided to make it more than a 'show and tell' and launched the first Surf Expo at Cocoa Beach's Cape Colony Hotel. By its fifth year the show had moved into Orlando's Tupperware Auditorium with 150 booths, and in 1989 it moved into its long-term home, the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.

From dmg world media to Emerald

The profile's back half is a period piece: a full description of dmg world media, the Sports & Leisure division based in Atlanta, Georgia, producing around 300 exhibitions a year as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Daily Mail & General Trust plc. Surf Expo has since changed producers: it passed with the former George Little Management portfolio to Emerald, the trade show group that acquired it in January 2014, and Emerald still produces the show twice a year at the Orange County Convention Center. The filed record - Virginia Beach hotel rooms, Cocoa Beach, 150 booths, then 2,400 - is the biography of an industry growing up around its own marketplace, and it is kept complete here.

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