If your business is even remotely related to hunting and shooting, you need no introduction to the SHOT Show. However, if you’ve never attended the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show owned and sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry, SHOT is an event you need to become familiar with if you’re looking for new opportunities.

This year’s event is right around the corner, running Tuesday, Jan. 19 through Friday, Jan. 22 at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Last Vegas, Nevada. If you’re not already scheduled to go, you’re probably too late. The show is open only to members of the trade, not the general public.

Realtree will be one of more than 1,600 exhibitors at this year’s show. The massive Realtree booth can be found on the second level, Booth Number 10719. You only need to get to the general area; trust me, the massive Realtree display is not difficult to find! At SHOT, the Realtree staff is on hand to talk business with many of its thousands of manufacturing and retail licensees, as well as discussing potential opportunities with new companies. Please stop by for a visit!

Here, courtesy of the NSSF, are your need-to-know (and just plain interesting) facts about SHOT. It’s not difficult to see why if you’re not there, you’re missing out.

• Exhibitors, buyers, media and other industry professionals hail from all 50 states and 100 countries. 
• SHOT is the largest event held at the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Total exhibit space for the 2016 show is expected to be more than 630,000 net square feet—equivalent to more than 13 acres, the area covered by the New Orleans Superdome or the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• The SHOT Show boasts 12.5 miles of aisles—just a little less than the distance of half a marathon.
• This is the 38th annual SHOT Show. The first SHOT Show was in 1979 in St. Louis, Missouri.
• The SHOT Show has been held 17 times in Las Vegas, more than in any other host city, including consecutively since 2010. SHOT Show will be presented at the Sands Expo and Convention Center through 2020 under the latest agreement.
• More than 63,000 professionals in the shooting, hunting and outdoors industry attended SHOT Show in 2015.
• More than 2,400 members of the outdoor and mainstream media, including international media, cover the show and promote the products they see at SHOT in their stories.
• The 2015 SHOT Show brought over $88 million in non-gaming revenue to the Las Vegas economy.
• The Law Enforcement section remains the fastest growing segment of the SHOT Show. To illustrate this growth, law enforcement was started 13 years ago, covering 7,000 square feet; today it covers more than 170,000 square feet of the show.
• Firearms and ammunition are a $6.6 billion industry (2014). The total economic impact of the industry is nearly $43 billion, which supports more than 263,000 jobs.
• The SHOT Show generates millions of the dollars in revenue that funds NSSF programs and services that help “promote, protect and preserve” hunting and the shooting sports. Among those programs are Project ChildSafe, the industry’s firearm safety education program; Don’t Lie for the Other Guy, which works to help prevent illegal straw purchases; and First Shots, which provides introductions to target shooting. See www.nssf.org for more information on NSSF programs and member services.
• The total weight of the exhibits for the 2015 SHOT Show brought in by Freeman, the SHOT Show’s general service contractor, exceeded 6,600,000 pounds, the heaviest show ever held at the Sands Expo Center.
• More than 32,000 scans for more information were made by media and buyers of the products located in the New Product Center of the 2015 SHOT Show.
• There were over 400 products on display in the New Product Center at the 2015 SHOT Show—the largest ever showcased in SHOT Show history.

Editor’s Note: To learn more, visit www.shotshow.org. And, contact us today if you’d like to join the thousands of businesses that have benefitted from a Realtree licensing agreement..