Baby Show (NEC, London) - crap or ace ?

[hub2dee]

12th - 13th May Birmingham and / or London in October.

I saw some older threads from a few years ago on this, but wondered if anyone had found it either mind-blowingly useful or a dreadful waste of time. We are just buying clothes / nappies / cot etc. for first and lots of the products we're interested in seem to have an exhibitor presence there.

Link to The Baby Show

a crazy place. I went last year as I had free tickets - went on sunday as I thought it would be less busy but it was a zoo. I was also 7 months pregnant at the time. tbh, the only advantages of going was to see producs that you might be interested in that you can't see anywhere else. I wouldn't bother!

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Middling but if you are going get there early as soon as it opens. We went (to London) on the Sunday and to begin with it was very useful got to actually see some of the products we were considering, got a demonstration of just how a nappi nippa worked, found the buggy we wanted at a good price, etc. But then by about 12 it was absolutely heaving and I couldn't really take it any more. It was useful but not indispensible, and if we hadn't arrived early it would just have been a nightmare.

Thanks both of you. Mad crowds do my head in. If we go, I'll make sure it's early, but I think I can do enough choosing bitsies at Mothercare or on the Web / MN to not need to. Thanks for the input.

Message withdrawn

I found it useful for comparing products in front of me which is hard to do without going from shop to shop. Found it hectic last year with a pushchair but not the year before just pregnant. Also pick up all freebies offered as they come in really handy and a good opportunity to try products.

if it can't be found in normal baby shops then it is probably not going to be so important to have, you can buy too much for a baby you know

Don't worry Mud, I'm all for buying the least possible (plus maybe a few treats)... but it's fun to now what's out there, and as Chuffed said, it's great to be able to compare.

It is quite common to find that even in larger pram shops / department stores, only a couple of the big conglomerate manufacturers are represented (Dorel for example owns many of the brands you might think are independent: "Dorel markets its Juvenile products under the Cosco, Safety 1st, Maxi-Cosi, and Quinny brands as well as the Ampa brands Babidéal, Bébé Confort, Baby Relax and MonBébé. "), so stores will often only have products from a few suppliers to make life easier.

A while back when I was choosing our buggy, I found it difficult to comapre a Mountain Buggy Urban with a Terrain as there are rather fewer MB dealers than say Maclaren.

Also some small independent companies with interesting / innovative / hand made / imported products have a presence here and some of them make / sell excellent stuff but have no distribution network or choose to sell direct.

We didn't actually buy much but used it as a good browsing session, all the companies details are in the booklet you get so you can source the things you like later.
With no car it is a nightmare hiking from shop to shop to try to find products.