Textile show Heimtextil is to see a change of management.
Margit Herberth (pictured) will succeed Meike Kern as director of home textiles. Kern is leaving Messe Frankfurt after 22 years for a new role.
Bettina Bär will continue as director of contract textiles, a role she began last September.
‘In addition to the significant expansion of national as well as global sales structures, Meike has also played a trend-setting role in the further development of Heimtextil into a content platform and global condensate of environmentally friendly textile innovations – not least in 2011 with the initiation of the first green formats. We wish her all the best for her new professional station,’ says Olaf Schmidt, Messe Frankfurt vice president textiles and textile technologies.
‘In her 15 years as director, she built strategic partnerships with customers on a global level, expanded sales channels and increased the market presence of exhibitors from core markets. In 2019, she also played a leading role in shaping the restructuring of Heimtextil and achieved an even clearer and more efficient visitor orientation at the trade fair with the targeted bundling and placement of the product range. In addition to several sustainable formats, she also established the Heimtextil Conference Sleep & More as a knowledge platform for the bedding trade as well as the industry and helped young start-ups to gain worldwide visibility at Heimtextil as part of New & Next.Heimtextil.’
Herberth will take up the new role on 1 September, moving from Messe Frankfurt, director of marketing consumer goods/multimedia and data.
‘We are delighted to have Margit, a proven sales strategist with a strong global sales as well as marketing background, as director Heimtextil,’ says Schmidt.
‘Herberth has more than a decade of sales expertise as senior sales manager for Messe Frankfurt’s international consumer goods fairs Beautyworld, Hair & Beauty and Christmasworld. Since 2018, as director of marketing communications, she has managed all marketing activities for the Paperworld, Christmasworld and Creativeworld brands and was responsible for the design of global brand campaigns. Most recently, as head of multimedia and data, she decisively drove strategic performance marketing, including the implementation of targeted smart data campaigns, as well as the further development of audio and video formats for consumer goods trade shows including Ambiente.’
