stoner owner
Hirschfeld’s events remain a must-stop for anyone in the headshop game – enabling them to completely stock their shelves under one roof and see what’s new and hot in the business.
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CHAMPS Trade Show
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Founder Jeff Hirschfeld
For the last 22 years, Jeff Hirschfeld has run one of the biggest hubs of glass and Cannabis culture in America: CHAMPS Trade Shows. A former accountant from Brooklyn who relocated to Sherman Oaks in 2011, Hirschfeld got his start in the trade show game when a client of his with a printing business asked him to attend one to help boost sales. “I ended up selling more equipment than his employees, so he hired me to manage his traveling sales team,” Hirschfeld recalls. “That’s how I became familiar with how trade shows operated.” A few years later, Hirschfeld – who’d loved weed since he was 16 – partnered with friend Peter Gage to start their own smokeware company, Gage Water Pipes. Utilizing his past expertise, he secured a booth at a national trade show and got his products into nearly 300 stores. But then, in 1998, he received a letter from the convention’s organizers saying that his company was no longer welcome because they were selling drug paraphernalia. So Jeff and his partners (Gage and a third partner, Josh
APR. 2022
Weitz) did what any savvy entrepreneurs would do – they started their own damn trade show. The smokeware convention we know today as CHAMPS began in 1999 under another name: Contemporary Tobacco Accessories, or CTA. The first CTA show was held at Gold Coast Hotel in Las Vegas and had just 32 booths. Over the next several years, the shows ran successfully twice a year in Vegas … but all of that changed in February 2003 when the Bush Administration executed their sweeping sting on the paraphernalia industry known as Operation Pipe Dreams. In a press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly referenced CTA directly (though not by name). In Hirschfeld’s words: “A reporter asked, ‘Why now, after a 13-month investigation?’ Ashcroft responded, ‘There is a pot trade show going on next week in Vegas and we want them to know we know about it!’” Operation Pipe Dreams had a chilling effect on both the show and the industry as a whole. Of the 260 vendors that had signed up to showcase at CTA, 190 canceled overnight – costing the show around a quarter-million dollars in booth sales. To keep the event afloat, Hirschfeld needed to take two drastic actions: To offset the enormous financial loss, he was forced to take out a second mortgage on his home;
and to distance themselves from the scrutiny associated with CTA, he and his partners decided to change the name of the show to the Contemporary Hand-crafted American-Made Products Show, or C.H.A.M.P.S. Still, for many years after, the word “bong” remained verboten both at headshops and at the show, and Hirschfeld refused any media coverage of the event in an attempt to keep it under the radar of law enforcement. Thankfully, those days have long since ended. “I would say around 2005 to 2006, it seemed to start loosening up,” Hirschfeld says. “By that time, people didn’t care as much about words, and the world started to understand that reality is reality. But again, it’s dependent on the state you’re in … obviously, we do our shows in progressive states.” The transition of language isn’t the only thing that’s changed since the early days. What’s surprised Hirschfeld the most has been the diversification of products featured in the booths. In the early 2000s, CHAMPS was essentially a bong show, with an estimated 70 percent of its wares comprised of various water pipes. But these days, thanks to more
