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For 75 years, Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. (MMPI) has been North America’s specialist in marketing support of buildings with wholesale showrooms. MMPI acts as a market maker for the industries it serves, bringing together wholesalers, retailers and consumers. In this capacity, MMPI is both a property manager and trade show producer, divisionally organized by the industries housed in its buildings and represented at its events. In recent years, MMPI’s portfolio has expanded beyond its traditional core of architecture and design to include industries as varied as contemporary art, construction, and real estate. We want the ever-growing and changing healthcare industry to be next.
Cleveland-based developer Forest City Enterprises first posited the idea of a medical mart in Cleveland in the mid-1980s. Forest City proposed converting one of its Tower City holdings, the former U.S. Post Office building that now houses the engineering firm Washington Group International’s offices, into a showplace for medical products.
Two decades later, Merchandise Mart Properties feels it is time for the medical mart concept to become a reality. Mr. Kennedy immediately found encouraging similarities between the Cleveland’s strong professional medical community and the design and manufacturing communities that support MMPI’s design centers and merchandise marts throughout the country.
Hundreds of medical trade shows and thousands more medical meetings and conferences are held in the United States every year. Many of these events involve the sort of extensive product displays and demonstrations that are found at the scores of trade shows and consumer events that MMPI has been successfully producing for over 50 years. We feel our proven business model, coupled with the vast influence of Cleveland’s medical community, can effectively consolidate and streamline the process of healthcare product demonstration and evaluation while providing a new economic engine for Cleveland.
The medical mart that MMPI proposes for Cleveland would be a collection of permanent showrooms displaying every kind of healthcare product from cutting-edge imaging machines to scrubs and scalpels all year round. The showrooms’ key clientele would be the primary decision makers in the healthcare industry: doctors, nurses, facility managers, interior designers and even architects. Coupled with a new, modern tradeshow facility capable of hosting large-scale temporary exhibits, we believe that a medical mart in Cleveland could bring as many as 50 mid-size to large medical trade shows to the city each year, generating in excess of $300 million in annual economic impact.
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