A Guide to JEC World for First-Time Exhibitors
JEC World is the annual gathering of the international composites industry, and the 2027 edition runs 2–4 March at the Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre. It is organised by JEC Group, which expects around 1,400 exhibitors. Doors open to visitors at 09:00 on all three days, closing at 18:00 on the Tuesday and Wednesday and at 17:00 on the Thursday. Exhibitor access starts an hour earlier each morning.
The floor spans an unusually wide set of end markets for a single materials show: aerospace and space, automotive and road transport, marine and shipbuilding, rail, building and civil engineering, renewable energy, sport and leisure, medical and prosthetics, oil and gas, electrical and electronics. One consequence is that your neighbours may be nothing like you, and a visitor walking your aisle may be evaluating a fibre, a machine and a finished part within twenty metres.
Who Exhibits at JEC World and What Visitors Want
The exhibitor list runs the length of the value chain. Raw material producers bring fibre, resin systems, cores and adhesives. Intermediate suppliers bring prepreg, dry fabrics, tapes and preforms. Then come tooling, machinery and process equipment, followed by part manufacturers, integrators, testing houses, simulation software and consultancies. Startups occupy their own zone through the Startup Booster programme.
The visitor is usually technical: a design or materials engineer, a process specialist, an R&D lead, a procurement engineer who understands what they are buying, or an academic. They are not there to be impressed. They are there to find out whether your material behaves the way your datasheet says, and the fastest way they know to find that out is to touch it. Plan for that and the rest of the stand can be quite plain.
Displaying Material Samples and Technical Specimens
This is the section that separates a JEC World stand from a generic one, and it is where most of the design effort should go. Start with reach. Sample positions belong at roughly working-counter height — somewhere around 950 to 1,050 millimetres — so an adult can handle a coupon without stooping or reaching. Anything below knee height gets ignored, and anything above shoulder height gets looked at rather than picked up.
Then decide, honestly, whether each piece is to be handled or protected. Handled pieces sit in an open recessed tray or on a discreet tether, with clear space beside them so a visitor can set one down and lift the next. Protected pieces — a polished cross-section, a delicate sandwich core, a competitor comparison you would rather keep — sit in a lit case. What does not work is putting the handling samples in the case as well, which happens whenever the display is designed for the photograph rather than the aisle.
Lighting is the part people underestimate. Carbon and glass laminates are largely defined by surface characteristics — weave, resin richness, fibre alignment, finish — and all of those disappear under flat diffuse light from directly overhead. A shallow grazing beam from one side reveals weave and texture. A matte, dark backing stops a glossy part from mirroring the ceiling rig. If you are showing high-gloss carbon, make sure nothing bright and white sits directly opposite it, because the part will reflect that instead of showing itself.
Sectioned specimens deserve special mention because they do so much work for so little space. A cut and polished laminate shows ply count, stacking sequence, resin content, void quality and edge condition all at once, to an audience trained to read exactly those things. A finished painted part shows none of it. Given a choice between one more complete component and three good cross-sections at eye level, take the cross-sections.
Label properly and label short. Material system, process, and the one or two numbers a specifier actually needs — areal weight, cure temperature, fibre volume fraction, whichever applies. Full datasheets belong on a QR code or in the hand, not silkscreened onto the wall. And decide before the show whether coupons are take-away or stand-only. Take-away coupons are effective and they vanish quickly, so bring far more than you think and plan somewhere to restock from without opening a storage door in front of a visitor.
Stand Size: Choosing Between 9, 18, 24 and 48 Square Metres
Nine square metres works for suppliers whose product is a specification rather than an object: resin systems, additives, testing services, simulation software. You get a back wall, a counter and standing conversations. You can display samples, but only a handful, and there is no comfortable way to sit down with anyone.
Eighteen square metres is the first size where a proper sample wall and a seated corner coexist. This suits distributors, intermediate suppliers and specialists who expect several technical conversations to run past ten minutes each. It is also the largest size we would attempt without dedicated storage, and on this floor storage matters more than usual because of sample restocking.
Twenty-four square metres is the threshold for a lit specimen case plus one real component with circulation around it. If you intend to bring a part that visitors should walk around rather than past, treat 24 m² as the working minimum. It also allows a semi-private corner, which matters when a procurement engineer wants to discuss a supply agreement rather than a material.
At 48 square metres you can hold a demonstration position, a large part and a private meeting at the same time without any of the three interfering. From 80 square metres upward a double-decker adds meeting capacity without eating the ground-floor area — and on a floor where ground-floor area is display area, that trade is usually worth making.
What a JEC World Stand Costs by Size
The ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, graphics, road freight, installation and dismantle. They exclude the floor space rental you pay to JEC Group, and the electrical, rigging and services orders placed through the exhibitor portal.
- 9 m² modular: €4,100–€8,700
- 18 m² modular: €4,800–€10,100
- 24 m² custom with a lit specimen case and sample wall: €11,500–€15,000
- 30 m² custom with enclosed meeting room: €15,000–€19,000
- 48 m² custom with a large-part display position: €19,000–€26,000
- 80 m² premium or double-decker: €34,000–€48,000
Getting to Villepinte, and Getting Your Parts There
Paris Nord Villepinte is well served, which is not true of every Paris venue. The exhibition centre has its own RER line B station called Parc des Expositions, roughly ten minutes from Charles de Gaulle airport and around thirty from Gare du Nord, with trains every few minutes. By road it is signposted from the A1, A3 and A104. The taxi rank sits in the main gallery between Halls 4 and 5 on level −1. JEC also runs free shuttles from CDG, from hotels near the venue and from central Paris during the show.
For the stand itself, the freight question is simple. We load in Frankfurt and drive roughly 570 kilometres — a single driving day, entirely within the EU. There is no customs file, no ATA carnet and no border clearance on the structure, the graphics or the fittings.
Your own material is where it can get complicated, and this is worth raising early. Samples, parts and demonstration equipment travelling from inside the EU move as freely as the stand does. Anything arriving from outside the EU — the United States, Japan, India, or the United Kingdom since Brexit — needs temporary-admission paperwork, normally an ATA carnet, and that sits with you or your freight agent rather than with us. We will tell you where the line falls, but we will not pretend it is ours to handle.
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
The most common is lighting the stand instead of lighting the samples, which turns glossy carbon into a mirror of the ceiling rig. The second is putting handling samples behind glass, which is usually a decision made for the render rather than the aisle. The third is bringing complete parts and no cross-sections, so an audience trained to read laminates has nothing to read. The fourth is treating a large part as a heavy-freight problem when it is really an access and sequencing problem, and discovering on build-up day that it will not turn the corner. The fifth is deciding to run a resin or infusion demonstration after the design is signed off, when permission and extraction should have shaped the layout from the start. Every one of them is settled at design stage or not at all.
Getting Started
Send us your stand size, your hall and stand number once JEC Group has issued it, and a short list of what you intend to display — how many sample positions, whether any specimens need a case, and the crated dimensions of anything larger than a suitcase. If you are considering a live demonstration, say so in the first message rather than the fifth. You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote back, at no charge and with no obligation.
Because JEC World runs every year, the sensible pattern here is a structure that stays put and a display that changes. We store the system frame in Frankfurt between editions, and each March costs a graphics refresh and a new sample set rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are designed for exactly that rhythm.
