Denver Mart

This past weekend was the annual winter Denver Gift, Home, Jewelry and Resort Show, together with the Denver Apparel and Accessory Market, a six day long retail show bringing together a thousand manufacturers with thousands of regional, national and international retailers. Featured were the late coming summer 2014 products, together with brand new end of the year merchandise. Commonly known as the “Denver Mart” show, the winter show is a roll-out of many products that will be in stores for the 2014 holiday season and is the primary show for the Rocky Mountain Region.

The Denver Mart was built in 1965 and expanded over the next five decades into the huge campus that it is today. The facility now includes more than a half million square feet of showroom and exhibition hall space, consisting of four connected buildings, a nine story hotel and a conference center. The facility hosts some two hundred public and retail events every year.

Fallout Shelter at the Denver Mart

Having been built in the era of the Cold War, this building still sports signs of this time, one of them being clearly visible fallout shelter signs, in the event of nuclear war. And it’s easy to believe that these signs are fully realistic. The inside of the building is a virtual radio dead zone, the walls heavy and thick enough that mobile phones are little more than expensive paperweights inside the facility.

Today the Denver Mart is home to 350 permanent showrooms with the ability to host over a thousand additional temporary exhibitors and well over ten thousand show attendees. The campus includes a full kitchen with a staff capable of providing full catering for the massive events the facility is famous for, an on site private security team for all types of events and a substation for the Adams County Sheriff’s Office. In the summer it’s perfectly normal to see horse mounted sheriff’s deputies patrolling the area. Fire and rescue services are provided by the North Washington Fire Protection District from a station located across the street. The fire marshal and a fire crew are a common site at the Mart during large events.

In the next few blog articles we will talk about our visit to the 2014 winter Denver Market. We look forward to having you follow us through this event.

[whohit]2014-02-24 Denver Mart part 1 – About the Mart[/whohit]