Colorado Springs—The 2023 NAFCD+NBMDA conference once again welcomed a capacity crowd here at the Broadmoor earlier this month as more than 1,200 attendees made the trek for this important fall conference. Co-locating seems to be the winning formula for the North American Association of Floor Covering Distributors as well as the North American Building Materials Distributors Association.
Kevin Gammonley, NAFCD executive vice president, attributes the strong turnout to several factors, including the fact that NAFCD membership as a whole continues to grow, with the majority of members choosing to participate in the annual convention. This coupled with the registration numbers showing distributor members are sending larger contingents of their key managers to convention.
In that same vein, Gammonley noted that the NAFCD convention exhibitor base also continues to grow, with manufacturers/importers continuing to see value in deepening their relationships with the distributor community. He shared statistics showing this year’s conference hosted 31 first-time exhibitors.
Arguably the biggest draw of the conference, he said, is the quality of the educational sessions and keynote presentations. This included the return of Brian Beaulieu and Connor Lokar of ITR Economics. “We are very pleased with early feedback on our education program this year,” Gammonley told FCNews. “Interest in the topics was evident by the very strong attendance at each session and the fact that the majority remained in the room for the duration of the presentations. As expected, our two economic trend presentations did extremely well. Our session on AI for distributors stood-out as an attendee favorite.”
Many of this year’s attendees also participated in NAFCD’s “University-in-a-Day,” a truncated version of its popular spring University of Innovative Distribution (UID) training program. “NAFCD has seen continuous growth each year in distributor support of our UID program,” Gammonley stated. “Distributors appreciate the distributor-specific curriculum, impressive lineup of industry thought-leaders and cost-effective registration fees.”