Have you ever had an on-site disaster?
The kind when things go horribly wrong with your stand?
Like display parts or exhibits not turning up.
Once, as a show organiser, I witnessed and helped salvage an exhibitor’s humongous problem.
It was humongous because the stand he designed and supervised was huge and built on two levels.
You couldn’t miss it, and that did not help him or the exhibitors around his stand feel good.
To cut a long and, at the time a, sad and tearful story for the designer concerned;
- The framework of the stand was constructed from scaffold poles
- Those poles were supposed to be new and shiny; they weren’t. They had come straight from a building site
- The flooring, walls and stairs within the stand were scaffold boards
- Like the poles, they were supposed to be clean and new, but they had also come battle-scarred from a building site near the NEC Birmingham
It looked terrible.
It was so bad that nearby exhibitors demanded the stand be pulled down.
However, we couldn’t do that because a high-ranking government minister had this stand on their show schedule’s Visit List.
I won’t bore you with how we salvaged things, but I will share the designer’s quote that has lived with me ever since.
“It looked so good when we built it with straws.”
If you have an event newbie on your team, someone you’re hoping to pass event organising details to in the future, you might want to buy them;
Trade Show Stand Mastery Part 1.
This email course covers everything they need to know about organising an exhibition stand and making it sales-ready.
It’s a bargain at just £49 plus VAT; reassuringly, straws are not shown or mentioned anywhere.
Very best,