Informa Gave Three Shows One Chief. Software Took The Reason To Attend.
Informa has placed MAGIC, Project and Offprice under a single events chief across Las Vegas and Nashville. When one desk can hold a market's wholesale tentpoles, the calendar has been thinned to fit, and the routine reordering that once filled the halls now runs through platforms like JOOR.
Sir John Crabstone
Informa has put MAGIC, Project and Offprice under one executive, Emilie Lewis, who will run all three across Las Vegas and Nashville. Three shows acquire a single chief when the calendar is contracting into fewer but bigger events. The routine buying that once filled the halls has moved onto a screen.
The company prefers the word expansion. Its 2026 diary runs four Las Vegas shows across the same three days each February and August: MAGIC, Project, Sourcing and Offprice, one trip for all of them. Adding Nashville as a second host city follows the same instinct: concentrate the year into a couple of destinations. Co-location is the courteous word for a calendar with less in it.
Offprice was not always Informa’s to fold. It arrived in 2023, when Informa acquired Tarsus for $940 million and folded the Tarsus show portfolio into its own. You put rival shows under one manager once they have stopped competing for the buyer and begun sharing him.
The reason to attend is what thinned. JOOR alone moved about $20 billion in wholesale orders a year across 14,000 brands and roughly 650,000 buyers. Its promise is that the reorder no longer needs the room. The hall now competes with a login.
MAGIC calls itself home to the industry’s largest selection of trend-driven and young contemporary apparel, footwear and accessories. Scale is not what a platform threatens. It takes the frequency: the buyer who once came twice a year to write orders now writes them on a Tuesday.
Software did not empty the halls; it removed the obligation to fill them.
We argued in the spring that wholesale buying now lives inside an interface. What the interface cannot send keeps the halls half-alive: the hand on the cloth, the order no one planned to write. The discovery stays. The paperwork has left.
None of this appears in the appointment notice, which speaks of a “next chapter of growth.” It would. A portfolio gains a single custodian at the moment it stops being a collection and becomes a remainder. Lewis inherits three good shows and one unwritten brief: make the fewer feel like more.