Exhibition Stands

An exhibition stand is four different purchases wearing one name. A modular stand is a reusable aluminium system you own and re-skin. A custom stand is drawn from a blank floor plan and mostly does not travel. A double-decker buys floor area you have not rented. A country pavilion houses many exhibitors under one identity. They have different lead times, different cost curves and different failure modes, and choosing between them is the single decision that most affects what you end up paying.

What does not change is the chain underneath. Somebody draws it, somebody cuts it, somebody puts it on a truck, and somebody stands in the hall at six in the morning making it fit a floor that turned out not to be level. We do all four from one workshop in Frankfurt. That is not a slogan about integration — it is the reason there is nobody to hand a problem to when a hall opens on a Tuesday and the graphics are wrong.

The variable that decides your budget is not usually square metres. It is how often you exhibit. A company doing one flagship show a year and a company doing five regional ones should not buy the same thing, even at the same footprint. The first is buying a one-off object; the second is buying an asset plus a per-show running cost. Most of the money we see wasted comes from applying the first model to the second situation.

The second variable is the stand number, not the area. A 30 m² corner with two open sides carries far more usable frontage than a 30 m² inline with one. We ask for the hall and stand number before we draw anything, because the number tells us how many sides face an aisle, and that changes the design more than adding ten square metres would.

What we do not sell is shell scheme. That is the organiser’s own partition walling, ordered from the show, and dressing it is a different trade. If your budget only reaches a dressed shell this year, say so and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth doing at all — some halls it is, some it very much is not.

Modular is the reusable route. An aluminium system, bought once, reconfigured and re-skinned per show. It covers 9 m² up to an 80 m² island, assembles to a fixed sequence in about a day, and the recurring cost drops to graphics and freight. It is the right answer for anyone exhibiting more than twice a year, and it is the answer most exhibitors arrive at by their third season whether or not they started there.

Custom starts from nothing. No system geometry to work around, so curved fascias, unusual materials, closed meeting rooms and sculptural elements are all available. It costs more per square metre, needs a longer lead time, and most of it does not come back. That is the correct trade for a product launch, a flagship show, or a footprint over roughly 100 m² where the architecture itself is doing the persuading.

A double-decker is the answer to a specific problem: you need more room than you have rented and the floor price makes renting more unattractive. Where hall height and organiser rules allow it, a second storey turns 100 m² into roughly 160 m² of usable area, with meetings upstairs and traffic below. It brings real engineering with it — structural calculations, a stamped design, venue approval and a longer build-up — so it is worth it when meeting space is genuinely the constraint, and not otherwise.

A country pavilion is a different discipline again. You are housing a trade body, a regional cluster or a national delegation: many exhibitors, one identity, individual co-exhibitor spaces, a shared reception and back-of-house. The hard part is not the build, it is fairness — every participant needs visible frontage while the pavilion still reads as one thing from the aisle.

If you are unsure which of the four you are describing, send the show, the hall, the stand number and what you need to happen on the stand. We will tell you which one fits, including when the answer is the cheaper one.