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OR Show Moving Back to Salt Lake City in 2023

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The Outdoor Retailer trade show is heading back to Salt Lake City. The show’s summer and winter editions had been held in Denver for the past five years.

The move back to Salt Lake City, where the show was held for 22 years before moving to Denver, will come after the show’s contract with Denver expires in 2022. The upcoming summer OR Show is still scheduled to take place in Denver, June 9-11, 2022. The first show back in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace Convention Center will be the winter show in January 2023.

In a statement released today, OR Show director Marisa Nicholson and Emerald Group VP Jeff Davis said,After much deliberation and input from all sides, we’ve decided the best move for Outdoor Retailer is to return to our basecamp. We’re heading back to Salt Lake City and County to the place we grew up and where our industry matured into the dynamic and powerful community it is today.”

The announcement comes on the heels of a challenging few years for not just the trade show, but for everyone in the industry. Show organizers have dealt with pandemic-related attendance and business issues, and also have been under pressure regarding the appropriate locale to host the show in.

In 2017, show organizers moved the OR Show out of Utah to Colorado in part due to outdoor industry brands and leaders speaking out against efforts by Utah’s elected officials to roll back national monument designations for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante. And just last month, the Conservation Alliance, along with more than 24 outdoor industry companies, put out a statement urging Emerald Expositions not to move the Outdoor Retailer trade show back to Utah. The group, including companies such as REI, Patagonia, The North Face, Timberland, KEEN and Oboz, stated that they “will not support or attend a trade show event in Utah so long as its elected officials continue attacks on national monuments and public lands protections.”

In its statement today, the OR team said that it is committed to effecting positive change, and will be dedicating resources to fund programs focused on outdoor recreation and protecting public lands. And, it said, “We have a strong relationship with Salt Lake City and a committed partner in Mayor Erin Mendenhall, whose values align with ours following tremendous investments in clean energy and a strong commitment to public lands. This proved to be a real turning point in our recent negotiations.”

The OR statement continued,It would be wrong for us to leave the way we did and simply go back as if nothing happened. In reality, leaving after 2017 has not brought the change we had hoped for, so we will push back, not pull back. We firmly believe that staying engaged and collectively contributing to the ongoing discussion, no matter how difficult, is far more constructive. We are the first to admit significant work is required to achieve change, so we are dedicating resources to making progress.”

You can read the full OR Show statement here.

As for the trade show itself, the OR team says it will focus on offering new experiences — adding channels for the industry to interact directly with consumers and conduct commerce with buyers year-round; and “moving beyond the walls of a convention center to present unique opportunities for commerce, storytelling, advocacy, knowledge and celebration.”