Bill Winsor, the chairman emeritus of the Dallas Market Center, died Friday after a brief illness.
Memorial services are still being planned for Winsor, 78, who was at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center in Texas at the time of his death, according to Cole Daugherty, the senior vice president of exhibitor marketing at the Dallas Market Center.
From 1993 through 2015, he headed the center as president and chief executive officer. After stepping down at the end of his tenure, Winsor was named chairman emeritus and remained active in the business. During his tenure at the Dallas Market Center, Winsor focused on growth, strategy, management and merchandising at what is now a 5 million-square-foot business-to-business marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of consumer products including women’s, men’s and children’s apparel and accessories; Western and English lifestyle products; home furnishings; lighting, holiday and floral; tabletop and housewares, and gift products.
Another keystone that he oversaw was the integration of fashion showrooms into Dallas’ World Trade Center in 2004. The result was a 1 million-square-foot marketplace for women’s, men’s and children’s apparel and accessories. That set-up led to a lifestyle marketplace under one roof for fashion, gifts and home products. In 2006, Fashion Center Dallas extended its reach by setting up its first pavilion for Chinese designers.
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Having worked with Winsor for 32 years, the Dallas Market Center’s president CEO Cindy Morris described him as “an amazing leader, who was incredibly fair and inspired people.” While executives tend to either be sales or marketing-oriented, Winsor excelled in both areas and knew how to communicate effectively. Winsor also had a reputation for being caring. Once after a new hire had to leave work early to care for an unwell child, she explained the situation and apologized to Winsor the next day. Morris recalled how he told her, “’Never apologize for leaving to be with your family. Don’t ever do that, because your family is the most important part of your life.’”
Each year more than 25 global trade events and other specialized trade events are held at the Dallas Market Center. Nearly 200,000 customers from 50 states and 85 countries visit the Texas site annually. A sign of how manufacturing shifted overseas years ago, the Dallas Market Center totaled nearly 7 million square feet and generated $7.5 billion in annual transactions in 2003.
But as manufacturing and sourcing trends changed, Winsor planned accordingly, too. His more recent contributions included overseeing the launch of this month’s debut of the Nearshoring America Expo, a trade event that brought together brands with vetted factories and supply chain service providers from Mexico and Latin America. He was also instrumental in launching a Western and English marketplace at Dallas Market Center in 2021.
In 1994, recognizing the prospect of greater global growth, Winsor extended the Dallas Market Center’s marketing beyond Mexico to South America. “The demand for U.S. goods is heightened the farther you get from the U.S.,” he told WWD at that time.
Born in Refugio, Tex., Winsor was a graduate of Southwest Texas State University with a bachelor of science degree in communications. Before joining the Dallas Market Center, Winsor served as president and general manager of Infomart, a former technology trade mart in Dallas. Winsor had joined Crow Family Holdings in November 1981 to establish Infomart and managed marketing, sales, operations and administration, acting in the role of general manager.
Winsor had been personally recruited by the developer Trammell Crow, who recognized his leadership skills and poached him from Texas Instruments. In that former post, Winsor had been responsible for corporate marketing and merchandising for five product groups including consumer goods, digital systems, geophysical services, government services and semiconductors.
Off-the-clock, he was a noted historian, a collector of Civil War artifacts, an amateur archeologist and the author of two books, “Texas and the Confederacy,” and “Let’s Cross Before Dark: A History of the Ferries, Fords and River Crossings of Texas.” And Winsor’s interest in Napoleon Bonaparte was so strong that he did some digs on battlefields where Bonaparte had fought to excavate some artifacts, Morris said.
Art was another pastime. Undeterred by his colorblindness, Winsor did many of the sketches and drawings in his first book. As an enthusiastic Texas rancher, he would level trees, repurpose them in his workshop on the ranch and make furniture. “When he first came to the market center, people used to say he was like a Renaissance man because he had such a wide range of skills. But he would want to be remembered for inspiring, sharing and teaching all of the knowledge that he had acquired over his lifetime. And he never stopped learning. He was always interested — he was interested in people, in their families and in what they were doing,” Morris said.
Such skills were put to good use at the Dallas Market Center, where the objective is to connect people, Daugherty said. “He was the ultimate connector of people and ideas and not just buyers and sellers, but connecting friends and people, who were passionate about the same things.”
Predeceased by his parents, Winsor is survived by his siblings Hallie Winsor Paul, Gloria Winsor Smith, and Charles Winsor, his wife Kathleen, and their sons Mark and Kelley.
