This weekend I was invited to Target Open Day 2024, and while it isn’t a public-facing event, it’s still great to see the community and friendship that are the backbone of the tech industry here in the UK. Many brands were there, along with a huge number of smaller and independent retailers from around the UK. Sure, many of them came to work, but the promise of some free grub and liberal use of the open bar certainly kept everyone in high spirits after a long day’s work, myself included.
Target is one of the UK’s most popular distributors, supplying retailers around the UK, as well as many international customers with computer components for their stores, and PCs that are used in a wide range of industries, retail, and gamers, to name but a few.
This is a big year for them too, as they’re now making a big push for LOGIX their own in-house gaming PC brand, built on the backbone of over 33,000 custom-built PCs.
I’ve been visiting Target Open Day yearly for about 12 years now, and it’s great to see that they still have pretty much all the same staff there. Their PC building team may have grown, but the original team is still there, and still hands-on, and you simply can’t buy that level of dedication and experience, and their customer service has a solid record, so I see big things on the horizon for LOGIX. Perhaps we’ll get one in for review in the not-too-distant future!
Beyond that though, there are a lot of our favourite brands at the show. Of course, that’s good for me as I’ve been friends with many of these brands for over a decade, so while we’re at work at these events, again, it’s more a family and community, even between “rival” brands and media; we’re all good friends, really.
DeepCool was there, showing their latest AIO coolers, air coolers, power supplies and more. Most of these we’ve seen already at Computex 2024, but of course, this is a good chance for retailers to get hands-on with them before supplying their own customers.
Antec has a solid showing too, with some amazing PC cases and accessories, many of which we’ve already reviewed, but it’s always great to see them demonstrated with custom builds and demos too.
It’s always fun to get hands-on with their new Core HS handheld too, of course!
UniFi, Genius, Tapo, Marvo, Pixl, Kingston, Viewsonic, Norton and many others were on show too, and while not all brands we directly work with at the moment, that is the point of these events, to put brands and customers (largely B2B customers of course) together in a room. Helping grow product availability in retailers and system integrators big and small around the UK.
The Amazing Iiyama 5K2K Red Eagle monitor was on display too, we actually reviewed that not long ago, and you can check it out here.
Our friends from Seagate were there too, and it’s actually one of my favourite product lines, with their licenced external hard drives. It’s hard to make external storage exciting, but for years, they’ve been creating drives that have become a decent amount of Christmas presents for my nerdy family members.
One of Target’s own in-house brands really got my attention though, as it’s hard to find good quality cables and accessories these days, with so many cloned and imported brands, and quite frankly a lot of fake reviews on Amazon and similar stores.
None of that problem here though, as these are all designed in-house, with a fantastic branding that colour codes everything into cables, mobile, apple, etc. The quality is second to none, so be sure to look out for these in your favourite retail stores.
I want to say a big thank you to the Target team for inviting me over, the food was great, the drinks were plenty, and best of all, the people from Target and all the brands were fantastic. It’s great to see the UK tech industry is still going strong. They’re pretty brave with evening Karaoke too, braver than I am!
If you have your own PC hardware or related brand, or a retail store of your own, online or offline, and want to be part of all this, reach out to Target Components to get in on the action.
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