CHAMPS Trade Shows is the B2B circuit where smoke shops stock up — glass, vapes and counterculture hardware, bought face to face since 1999. The show tours major cities all year, and its Las Vegas editions are the anchor: three days of hand-blown glass, new gear and the buyers who write the orders.
Running Since 1999
CHAMPS launched in 1999, almost a decade before the first legal adult-use store existed anywhere in the country. It was built for the businesses that kept the culture supplied anyway — the head shops, the glass blowers, the accessory makers — and it has stayed a business-to-business show ever since.
A quarter century later the format still holds. Exhibitors are manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, glass artists and inventors; the badges walking the aisles belong to smoke shops, vape shops, dispensaries, hookah lounges, c-stores and online retailers. Most of them do their buying for the season right there on the floor.
The catalog runs wider than pipes: smoking accessories, hand-blown glass, counterculture apparel, novelty and specialty gift lines, even mycology suppliers. If an independent shop sells it, somebody at CHAMPS wholesales it — which is exactly why the buyer list stretches from head shops to gas stations.
The Glass Games
What separates CHAMPS from every convention-center clone is that it treats glass as an art form, not a SKU. The Glass Games put working artists in competition at the show itself, with a standing Winners Circle and a masters bracket that functions as the craft's title fight.
The 2026 Masters ran 23 artists against each other under the theme “From Innerspace to Outerspace,” with more than $45,000 in prizes and a $20,000 grand prize on the line. Micro-sculpted molecules next to a child-sized glass skeleton — that range is the point, and it is why collectors follow the results.
A Circuit, Not a Date
CHAMPS runs coast to coast rather than parking in one city. The 2026 calendar has already passed through Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Austin, and three stops remain: Las Vegas at the convention center August 26–28 with the floor open 11 AM to 6 PM daily, Austin's Palmer Events Center October 13–15, and Fort Lauderdale's Broward County Convention Center November 17–19.
Registration and exhibitor applications run through the official CHAMPS site, and the show keeps a hotel-block-and-shuttle setup around its bigger stops — a real consideration in Vegas, where resort fees stack up fast over a three-day buy.
The Floor Keeps Shifting
The mix on the floor tracks where the market is moving. At the summer 2024 Las Vegas show, hemp-derived THCa flower and seed companies had pushed into space once ruled by pipes and papers — brands chasing the states that still have no adult-use storefronts.
That edition also said something about the show's pull. A software outage had grounded thousands of flights that week, and buyers drove across state lines to make it anyway; president Jeff Hirschfeld called it the show's biggest turnout ever. When people abandon airports for a trade show, the trade show is doing its job.
Why It Matters
Cannabis trade shows come and go with the market cycle. CHAMPS predates all of them, and it survives because it serves a layer of the culture that never needed legalization to exist: the shops, the artists and the hardware brands that meet every season to keep each other in business.
If you run a shop, this is where your shelves get planned. If you blow glass, it is the closest thing the craft has to a championship season. Either way, the events calendar should carry at least one CHAMPS stop a year.