Twenty years ago this month, I began working on a new publication called Stone Business Magazine and prepared for my first tile-and-stone show: Coverings 2002 in Orlando. Now, I’m producing a different magazine – Stone Update – and making my final plans to be at Coverings 2022 in Las Vegas. There are plenty of show badges, airline miles and a long list of interesting lodging in those two decades. There’s still something I haven’t seen – a North American hard-surfaces-industry show. Yes, I know that there are claims we have that now. The problem is that there’s a product that’s still slim on presentation. And it’s missed. While the term hard-surfaces wasn't used 20 years ago, I could identify five shows touching on the trade: Coverings, StonExpo, SURFACES, the International Tile and Stone Show (ITSS) and the International Solid Surface Expo. There are two survivors from that list, with Coverings being joined by a combined SURFACES/StonExpo as The International Surface Event. All of them had a giant product group slip away: quartz surfaces. To say that the relationship between quartz-surface manufacturers and the rest of the industry has been fractious is a gross understatement. Most of this stems from before the Great Recession, with plenty of rock-throwing, name-calling and, well, radon. Ill-feelings still simmer on both sides. Frankly, manufacturers got a fairly crummy reception in the early 2000s from events where the material didn't fit the traditional lines of products. Probably the worst reception -- besides the oft-heard "get that ^*%# out of here” from natural-stone purists -- came from the Solid Surface Expo, which once moved to ban the material from its event, lest if overrun the solid-surface makers. That ban was quickly reversed, but it soured relationships going forward. That left to a drift (and, among some, a tacit agreement) to appear at the Kitchen and Bath Show (KBIS), where quartz-surface slabs appear among the latest in luxury kitchen ranges, cutting-edge washer-dryers and the fanciest toilets on the planet. It’s a super-expensive show for exhibiting (it's surprisingly easy to see a nearly $1 million budget on a display) to fish out designers and the occasional fabricator willing to tromp with the hordes of 60,000+ there for KBIS and the concurrent International Builders Show. I've been to KBIS many times and, while quartz-surface exhibits are large and beautiful, the product remains an outlier as an unfabricated material among the rest of the ready-to-use product vendors. Enough time has passed that quartz-surface manufacturers likely don't feel they need to go to another industry show as opposed to a design affair, and they’ve been joined in recent years by some porcelain slab/sintered-surface makers. Don’t try to find anything for hard surfaces besides materials. KBIS is not a show for people who get their fingernails dirty and chipped on a daily basis. A full hard-surfaces show needs to have a large selection of materials as well as supplies and machinery. The Natural Stone Institute is making a good effort with its Natural Stone Pavilion at TISE. But, there needs to be a determined push to capture the growing market in porcelain slab and pull some quartz surfaces into the mix to make an event attractive (and successful) with a full range of customers. So who's going to do it? That's still an open question. It could be TISE, with its link with StonExpo and the Stone Equipment and Suppliers Association (SESA). Coverings is certainly not out of the running. Maybe it's time for something new. And it’s definitely time to recognize that we are an industry of different products that need to bring customers together. The concept of limiting materials is parochial and way-out-of-step with the market. Just take a look at 2021’s hard-surface import data and it’s easy to see that ship has indeed sailed. I don’t think I’ll have to wait through another 20 years of shows to see the missing pieces fall into place. But don’t be surprised to see a crankier old guy keep calling for the solution.