ToughBuilt… Coming to a venue near you soon!

No one can deny that the past few years have been tough for most businesses. COVID-19 meant restrictions on both our personal and professional lives in the interest of ensuring public safety. Trade shows were cancelled throughout 2020 and many also in 2021.

As a new operation in Europe, the team at ToughBuilt yearned for the opportunity to get on the road and meet existing and potential customers.

The reasons for this are simple. Firstly, as a business, we believe in the importance of relationships, and physical face time is often more conducive to building closer customer connections. And secondly, the rugged nature of our products can only be fully appreciated if they are experienced first-hand.

From the UK to Europe and back…

Understandably then, as the world learned to live with COVID-19 and returned to a new kind of normal, ToughBuilt has been keen to make up for lost time.

We demonstrated twice in the UK at the back end of 2021, at the Health & Safety Event and Toolfair in Birmingham and Surrey respectively. These were exciting milestones for ToughBuilt, as our first B2B and B2C European tradeshows, and flagship events for the brand.

Our exhibition activity this year commenced in March with our appearance at Gedex in Bordeaux. This trade event was staged by the leading French retailer of construction products and materials, the Gedimat Group.

It allowed us to showcase our offer to staff from across the customer’s business including many of the managers from its hundreds of stores located throughout France. Some of these individuals were discovering ToughBuilt products for the first time whilst those who were already familiar with our brand were surprised at the sheer breadth of our range.

Later the same month, we appeared at TMB (Troy Means Business) 2022, which took place at Silverstone, England. This event was staged by Troy – the UK’s leading buying group for distributors of industrial engineering supplies. Troy brings together over 300 members, who collectively operate 400 sites across Great Britain, and enjoys combined buying power of £1.1 Billion.

The show had many highlights and none bigger than the success of our revolutionary Scraper Utility Knife in winning the TMB 2022 Innovation Award, which was judged by qualified engineers from companies including Jaguar Land Rover and Dyson.

… to Scandinavia and Germany

Our next stop was the Stockholmsmässan in Sweden for our debut appearance at Nordbygg – the Nordic region's biggest show for the construction industry which attracts around 900 exhibitors and approximately 48,000 visitors from across Scandinavia, the Baltic states and Europe.

Our appearance closely followed our confirmation of new distribution agreements with Eggestrand AB in Sweden as well as Smarte Løsninger AS in Norway. The exhibition was the perfect platform to highlight a number of the products now available from these partners – including our category leading Sawhorses.

In June, we returned to Scandinavia for the Global DIY Summit in Copenhagen (pictured in cover), a major international event attended annually by retailers and manufacturers from the home improvement and garden centre industry.

More recently, we made our inaugural appearance at Germany’s leading woodworking trade event, Holz Handwerk. Staged biennially, Holz Handwerk regularly attracts over 110,000 carpenters, woodworkers, and joiners. This year, it took place in July at the NürnbergMesse, Nuremberg, after having a forced COVID hiatus since 2018.

We used the show to make the first ever public demonstration in Germany of the new ToughBuilt® QuickSet Work Bench. Given its woodworking focus, the event also provided the ideal opportunity to promote our Sawhorses, Mitre Saw Stands and Roller Stands.

See us next in Cologne, Paris and Valencia

As we move into the third quarter of the year, ToughBuilt’s European exhibition schedule is far from over. In late September, we’ll be at the Eisenwarenmesse/ International Hardware Fair at Cologne Exhibition Centre, where you can find us on stand D015/C014 in Hall 10.2. From 25th to 28th  September, welcoming 2000 suppliers from over 40 countries to showcase tools, industrial supplies, fasters and fixings, and home improvement solutions.

Then from October 3rd to 6th, we are exhibiting at Batimat, France’s largest industry event, held at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Batimat typically welcomes 320,000 visitors, with over 1,700 exhibitors and is focused on futurism, connectivity, and digitalisation in construction. Our stand number is 4-G093.

We’ll also be appearing at the 11th edition of Eurobrico which runs from October 4th to the 6th at the Feria Valencia. Eurobrico brings together store managers, decision makers and purchasers with suppliers and manufacturers in the hardware and construction sector.

We’ll be releasing details regarding our plans for each of these events in the coming weeks.

If you’re attending any of these shows, we’d love to see you. If you’re new to ToughBuilt, it will give us the opportunity to introduce you to our range and the many benefits we can deliver for your business. And, even if you’re familiar with us, come and visit us for a sneak-peek into our future.

Given our unrelenting programme of product research and development and our commitment to redefining expectations across hand tools and jobsite products, you can rest assured there will always something new to discover with ToughBuilt.