Easyfairs has postponed the next leg of Packaging Innovations & Luxury Packaging London until 8-9 December, 2020.
The event was due to take place on 23-24 September at Olympia London. The UK Government recently gave the date of 1 October, 2020 as the date for the exhibition industry in England, at least, to resume operations.
This was welcomed by Chris Skeith, CEO at the Association of Exhibition Organisers (AEO), who said, ‘We are pleased to see that after months of constructive conversations with the government, a go-date has been issued for the exhibitions industry, which plays a critical role for the UK economy, generating £11 billion in economic activity and supporting 114,000 jobs.’
Easyfairs has also launched a series of webinars that are intended to ‘provide relevant content and tackle discussions that are vitally relevant to the packaging community at the current time’, all under its Packaging Innovations, Empack, Luxury Packaging, ADF, PCD and PLD brands. Entitled ‘Innovation Talks’, they mix formats of presentations and panel discussions on topics and are free to join.
Renan Joel, divisional director for Easyfairs UK & Global’s packaging events, explained, ‘The international outbreak and spread of COVID-19 has had a huge impact on everyone’s lives, and specifically in the exhibitions industry on the ability to bring people together and run live events.
‘Whilst we have worked hard on health and safety measures to ensure that we could be very positive about the running of a safe and successful event in September, the two-week quarantine period for anyone arriving in the UK that was recently enforced as part of the UK Government Action Plan to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, followed by last week’s announcement from the Prime Minister that events are only able to run as from 1 October, 2020, has unfortunately put us in the Force Majeure position of having to move the show.’
Mr Joel continued, ‘Being a truly international show, Packaging Innovations & Luxury Packaging receives 43.3% of its exhibitors from 17 different countries outside the UK; these current travel regulations make it impossible to run such an international exhibition in September. In addition, the government announcement on Friday opening up events to run from 1 October confirms that we can safely and successfully run the event in December.
‘Having already spoken to many in our community, we have been overwhelmed by the positivity and enthusiasm with which the move has been received and the support that the packaging industry has shown for our events generally. It is very clear that they will play a crucial role in the rebuilding of many sales pipelines in sectors that have suffered, and are vitally placed to bring the industry back together after a long period of distancing, social and physical.’
