Smart blog: Sustainable stand build

We design and build exhibition stands for businesses across the full spectrum of industry sectors and, if there’s one issue that unites them all, it’s sustainability. We all have a responsibility to play our part for the planet and, whatever brief we take, our potential customers want to know how our core values can align with theirs when it comes to a sustainable approach.

And as industries go, we are pretty wasteful. Most exhibitions last for two or three days, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out there’s a lot of potential for waste. Traditionally, stands were designed using the cheapest materials possible, installed for the event, dismantled three days later and thrown into a skip. If brands had several trade shows per year, the process was repeated, and that was lot of landfill piling up on the conscience of the events industry.

Thankfully these days are different. Like most stand builders, we use an adaptable system for structures that can be reconfigured from one client to the next. It’s lightweight, which cuts back on the carbon footprint of transportation, and we re-use as many elements as possible, storing them on behalf of the client for future re-use time and time again.

But as a creative industry, recycling shouldn’t be at the expense of making the right impact in the aisles. Brands want to re-use as much as possible, but they need the stand to look fresh too. Sometimes the key message can change from one season to the next, rendering the previous season’s graphics redundant. Or the launch of a new product may require a whole new platform, and the reconfiguration of last year’s stand.

Our advice is always to invest into the bespoke components that are unlikely to change. This could be a slatted ceiling in your brand’s key colours, or a custom counter-top in a finish you want to use again and again. Re-using these quality elements reinforces your brand presence from one event to the next, promoting consistency, reassurance and familiarity to your customers.

Your stand design can evolve around these anchor features from one event to the next to keep the look fresh and contemporary. We do always recommend keeping your fabrics, because our system is very versatile. Even if a message changes, we can recycle and reproduce one panel of fabrics, re-using the ones that are still relevant. Even when orientations change, it is generally possible to re-use as many fabrics as we can within the new stand structure.

Finally, we encourage brands to get creative. Our design team is well-versed in combining flair and function, and they love a challenge. Just last month, a new client came to us wanting a brand new stand design to herald its new era of development, but they felt guilty at the prospect of wasting some new tool kits they had bought recently to display their product which no longer aligned with their aesthetics. Our designer’s solution was to factor the cases into the design, transforming each case into a bespoke laptop plinth that became a bespoke style feature that blended seamlessly with the design. The stand has been awarded Best Stand Build every time it’s been built, so the design certainly worked #wemakeevents