Dreaming of your first or next tradeshow booth? Designing and producing a booth takes time, lot’s of details, and investment. We put together the below list of 10 essential questions that will help get your project off to a productive start. You should be ready to answer the following for your designer:
- WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET? I know, I know … another designer asking for my project budget! Well, we get it … but, when it comes to designing and producing tradeshow booths, really the sky is the limit. We have experience in creating booths of every size and scale and it really is up to our client to tell us what they want and need — and that is tied directly to a budget. We can create anything from a start-up exhibit that only requires a pull-down banner and backdrop to an entirely custom designed standalone booth complete with a chef and cooking stations, glass branded meeting rooms and stairs! We’ve done it all — and the budgets can scale way up and way down. The budget question is critical to give us a parameter around which to begin to create. Don’t fret — we will be just as budget conscious and creative with a 10 x 10 eight-thousand dollar booth as we would with triple the space and budget.
- DOES YOUR COMPANY HAVE EXISTING BRANDING / LOGO GUIDELINES? Any branding assets from logo files to photography is helpful. Also, if we have never worked with your company before, some of your marketing materials so we can get a sense of your company’s voice, aesthetic, personality, use of branding and so forth.
- WHAT SIZE WILL YOUR BOOTH BE? Is it inline, or on the end of the aisle? Where your booth sits in the aisle is important for what we can do on the sides or understanding traffic flow and positioning of graphics. We also like to see the show floor map to see where in the hall the booth resides so we can make the most of the space from every direction.
- HOW WILL YOU DO BUSINESS IN YOUR BOOTH? Do you need meeting space? Places to write orders? Play video on a mounted display? Station for demos? If a food product, do you require food prep?
- DO YOU NEED TO SHOW OR DISPLAY PRODUCT? If yes, what do you need to display and how much? What about storage at the booth of product? Does it require any special handling, such as refrigeration, for example? Is there a preferred way to display your project? Will you have samples to give away during the show?
- DO YOU HAVE ANY EXISTING BOOTH OR DISPLAY MATERIALS? Sometimes the best place to start is what already exists. We can often take existing materials and refresh them with current branding and / or messaging. Reprinting graphics to fit with the existing hardware, for example, saves money. That leaves more in our budget to add in a cool or unique feature or put the savings toward a fun giveaway, etc.
- DO YOU NEED GIVEAWAYS, UNIFORMS OR SALES MATERIALS TO HAND OUT? We like to think about supporting materials at the same time as the booth design so the message and design all work together. For example, when designing a booth for a frozen food brand, we produced brightly colored branded freezer shopping bags to handout with product coupons tucked inside. Or for a landscape designer, we sourced and had produced branded burlap bags containing flower seed bombs with the company’s colors.
- WHAT ARE YOUR SHOW DATES? We will need to be in contact with show services to ensure we hit deadlines, avoid rush fees, and shipments arrive within the show’s timeline.
- FOR LARGE BOOTHS, WILL YOU REQUIRE HELP CRATING, SHIPPING, ASSEMBLING – AND FOLLOWING THE SHOW – STORAGE AND BOOTH RE-ACTIVATION? We can help advise and project manage tradeshow booth production from activation, design, set-up to storage.
- FINALLY, WHAT ARE YOUR FUTURE PLANS FOR YOUR BOOTH? Will it grow? Should we be thinking about creating something that can be added onto next year? What about in five years? How many different shows will you be attending? Are the spaces at various shows different sizes and have changing placements on the show floor? This helps us thinking about how your booth can “grow” with the next iteration, or to design the booth from a variety of sizes so it can scale up or down, and also helps decide what items to rent vs. own.
We hope these questions help with the decision-making and planning for your next show. We are happy to help with our expertise and creative suggestions to get your next booth going!
