To a person, the salespeople said that their company started making hoverboards because they were “the new hot product” or “the new big seller.” “Last year the selfie stick was very popular,” said a young woman named Rachel Yu, who, along with several other salespeople from the 3-year-old Ocam Electronic factory, had made the two-hour journey from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to find new business for its hoverboard, the Esway. “But we need to change with the market or we’ll die.”

Now selfie sticks don’t even appear on the Ocam website, and the company has gone all-in on hoverboards. Ocam offers the boards in two making that cost between $250 and $760 per piece, according to specifications. The factory can make about 5,000 of them a month, Yu said.

Ocam’s business is selling to distributors — evenly split between the US, Europe, and the Middle East, Yu said — that resell a factory’s product and “add the value” of their name and branding. A distributor could be a well-branded Shopify site, but it could also be an enormous retailer. A salesperson for Kungfuren, a Dongguan factory that makes selfie sticks for Wal-Mart, said her company was in discussions with America’s largest business to sell hoverboards to it through an importer.

In a sense, the purpose of the booths wasn’t to show that a factory had a long, proud history of making hoverboards. Rather, it was to show that a factory was flexible enough to build the boards in any conceivable configuration of colors and components, to the exact specifications of the buyer.

Those buyers skewed toward countries where hoverboards hadn’t yet hit it big, or where intellectual property litigation — who actually owns the patent on hoverboards in several countries is still very much up in the air — didn’t threaten sales. Two suitable Turkish business partners who claimed to have invented an electric car thought they could crack the hoverboard market at home. An Italian cell phone accessories salesperson with a mop of ink-black ringlets thought he would sell some for the holidays. A Saudi importer joked that hoverboards were so popular in his country because everyone had money and nothing to spend it on.

And an American salesperson named Ryan Knott was sent on behalf of his firm, SGH Holdings, to decide whether to invest heavily in hoverboards or not. The company had sold something called CoolSculpting, a form of “non-surgical fat reduction treatment,” but decided to switch course. Knott, who wore shiny loafers and a dynamite tan, had decided to get into the business 45 days before. At the show, Knott was worried about the market becoming oversaturated, and the dozens of identical manufacturers weren’t doing anything to help.

“They all throw the same thing at you,” he said. “They’re really all the same.”