A+A trade fair is the biggest safety and health at work fair. It’s held every other year in Germany Dusseldorf. The first “messe” was in 1947 over 70 years ago so it has a long history. The Fair is held in Messe Dusseldorf center. It’s one of the biggest fair areas in the world. The area includes 17 huge halls. One hall is the almost same size as Pirkkahalli in Tampere. The total exhibition space of 306,000 m2 of which 262,700 m2 is indoors. The company Messe Dusseldorf is one of the largest in the industry. More than 40 annual fairs are staged at the premises in Düsseldorf, including 23 leading events in their respective sectors.

The fair is basically for businesses like factories presenting their product and resellers looking for suppliers. There are always people and companies around the world. 2019 fair was canceled because of a bad situation with covid-19 but this time it was held after a 3-year break. There are usually over 2000 thousand exhibitors and over 70 000 visitors. This time there was less because there are still a lot of restrictions about traveling. Many factories are from high-risk covid areas so traveling to Europe can be difficult. A+A is an excellent place for networking with many businesses and starting a possible partnership.

Safety and health at work is a large topic and, it includes a lot of things. Deeper topics and areas topics were divided into different halls. The main areas were clothing, gloves, shoes, glasses, harnesses, and machines. There are so many different new types of equipment and product presented by manufacturers and suppliers. Every time there are innovations that you haven’t seen before or even think about. As an entrepreneur, it’s the perfect place to go to get more ideas to develop business. If you want to work in the field that’s the place you should know and have to visit.

This was my first time at the fair, but my business partner has visited there a few times before. It was an unbelievable experience for me to visit a big international business event. I had a chance to meet many business owners around the world. The learning I got from there is indescribable. Our company importing safety gloves and clothes. Going to the fair was super important for us because we are quite a new company and need more suppliers and connections around the world. The main reason we went there was to find suppliers from Asia for gloves, and suppliers from the EU for clothing. We reached our goal to find a factory with good quality, shipping terms, and payment terms. It’s much easier to move forward now.