Chinalure

Eighteen Editions of the Weihai Show. We Have Been There Since the First One.

In October 2008 our home city held its first Weihai International Fishing Tackle Expo. It ran for three days, and it was the first fully market-run professional exhibition in the city's history. We booked a stand. Eighteen editions later we are still doing roughly the same thing: a few square metres in a hall, a wall of lures, and whoever from the workshop can spare three days away from the line.

The show is a big one for us, because it happens twenty minutes from the factory. Anything a buyer wants to see that is not on the stand can usually be fetched the same day. That is the practical reason we have never skipped it.

What is on the stand this year

Lures are still the centre of it, and they always will be. Soft plastics in the bodies and colours our buyers actually reorder, squid jigs in full colour runs, jig heads in lead and lead-free, metal jigs, spoons, spinners, blade baits, ice lures and flies, plus the 2026 additions to the range. Three of the walls are hung by category so you can compare a whole family in one walk instead of flipping through a catalogue.

The fourth wall is the OEM and ODM desk. If you have a design, a competitor's sample you want matched, or an idea scribbled on paper, bring it over. We quote what we can quote on the spot, and the rest within a few days of the show, because the mould and tooling people are a phone call away rather than in another country.

We also keep trolling teasers, spreader bars and rigged skirt lures out where the light hits the tape, since those are the ones buyers want to hold rather than photograph.

Milestones of the show, from where we stand

• 2008 First edition runs October 9 to 11, the first fully market-run professional exhibition in Weihai. We book a stand.
• 2017 The expo is named one of the first Shandong provincial brand exhibitions.
• 2023 The 15th edition moves to the Weihai International Economic and Trade Exchange Center. The show gets much bigger and the aisles get longer.
• 2025 The 17th edition passes 70,000 sqm with more than 1,100 exhibitors, the largest fishing tackle export show in the country.
• 2026 Number eighteen. Same city, same three days, same wall of samples.

What eighteen editions taught us

Buyers arrive with a list. The ones who place an order are almost never the ones who take the most brochures. They are the ones who pick a lure off the wall, turn it over, check the hook gauge and the paint edge, and then ask what the carton costs. So we stopped printing long catalogues for the stand and started bringing more sample stock instead.

A show floor is a bad place to judge how a lure swims. Nobody can tell you that on a Saturday afternoon in a hall with a thousand exhibitors and a low ceiling. If a jig or a spoon looks right in your hand, the next step is a sample in your own water, not another conversation at the stand.

Three days is also not enough time to open a new mould. If you want a new head shape, a new colour run or a private-label carton, bring the drawings and the target price with you. Otherwise we end up exchanging emails for a month, which is fine, but it means the show did less for you than it could have.

If you are coming to Weihai

Send us your enquiry list before September 19 and we will have the samples pulled and waiting at E2 2125, which saves you the walk between halls. Tell us the categories, the target prices and the volumes you move in a year, and we will tell you straight away which lines fit and which ones do not. Write to young@chinalure.com.

If you cannot make it this year, we will post photos and short notes from each day on the show reports page. Either way, email reaches us faster than a show floor does.