Did you know that this year marked the first 100% Optical run by the new organisers, CloserStill Media?
At the event we caught up with Robert Chapman, commercial director for the human and animal healthcare portfolio at CloserStill, to find out more about the new organisers of the trade show. If you'd like to watch and read more about CloserStill, Rob shares more here: https://ow.ly/gZ7F50VsnqO
Probably the biggest thing is the importance of the community. You know, we serve a lot of a lot of professions. They don't quite often get that in their work life. I am Rob Chapman, I am the commercial director for Closest Hills human and animal Health portfolio. Closer Stills started back in 2009 and actually our first events that we bought were actually in the healthcare world. We bought a small business that ran the pharmacy show and the dentistry show. And later that year we launched a vet show in London. And since then we've grown. Those events massively as well as growing the portfolio to what is now our portfolio of I believe 19 different healthcare events in both primary and secondary care. We've watched 100% optical from afar for quite awhile, so we'd often wondered about how 100% obstacle could fit in our portfolio. And whilst Media 10 have done an absolutely fantastic job growing the event to what it is now, we always felt it might fit a little bit better with us. So yeah, it's one that we've kept an eye on for a long time and being here over this last couple of days, it has really reaffirmed. We thought the profession and the exhibitors are just a really good bunch of people who really care about their business and their industry, which fits so well with so many of the other markets we serve as well. So it's been really good to be here. This last couple of days has really been about finding out what we can bring over and what the similarities are. There might be some things that we can learn and some things we can bring across, but really it's a similarities I'm interested in and the similarities are the importance of the CPD. It's the importance. Of the exhibitors in supporting the event. But probably the biggest thing is the importance of the community. You know, we serve a lot of a lot of professions who need a sense of community and they don't quite often get that in their work life in the same way as they can at an event like this where they can meet a lot of people, old friends and new, who go through similar situations. That for me is the similarity which really brings everything together and the more we can do to harness that across all our ends, the better will be.
