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hemisphere, here in Australia it’s only been three seasons. So these events are very very important to us, and for me personally it’s been great to connect with people I haven’t seen for a long time. We’ve experienced a great deal of interest in both our residential and commercial ranges. We came here not knowing what to expect. Everyone comes with high expectations and they want to walk away with new leads and exciting opportunities. The takeaways for us is that on the residential side of the business there are a lot of new retailers that want to join our dealer program, so that’s very good. That’s really, really positive. On the commercial side of the business, we’ve had councils here and that surprised us. I think most people expect this show to be just residential – retailers, residential pool builders – but we’ve had a number of councils come here, specifically seeking us out. Being selfish, what that does is it actually pays for the booth. We’ve actually got business literally from those visits. Not just follow ups and send me a brochure. Literally, we want to go ahead with that, we wanted to meet the person we’re going to be doing business with. Gold Coast City Council have signed off on some major projects for us.” Hall says the product that attracted most attention from councils was
their new swimwall and bulkhead. “Essentially a lot of commercial pools are struggling with the numbers of people getting into them. So they want to start programming the area of the pool into different zones .So we build these walls, and all of a sudden half the pool can become a water polo field, and half can become a 25 metre lap pool. And we can do that for one lane, two lanes, four lanes, eight lanes. Bond University have invested in an eight-lane swimwall. It’s anchored to the floor and it’s pneumatically operated. We go and install it with our divers. So basically they can get 30 to 40 more people into the pool. So that pool becomes two pools, and there’s no limit to what you can do with it.” 46. Candy Gold (with Gary Clarke) of Aqua-Quip says the show was outstanding. “There’s been a great quality of visitors, people from all over Australia and even Europe – and a lovely calibre of visitor.” Visitors were particularly interested in the new InstaTouch remote control for their pool lights. “It offers fixed colours, colour shows and colour selections, dimming options and everything you could possibly dream of to make lights work beautifully efficiently and as brightly as possible.”
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August/September 2018 SPLASH! 47