Pie Factory designed and delivered Banking Circle’s 12m by 9m booth at Money20/20 in Amsterdam in June 2023, built in agricultural waste board, FSC plywood and 100% recycled acrylic.
Banking Circle · Money20/20 · Amsterdam, Netherlands · 2023 · Finance and professional services · Design; Production; Project Management
Money20/20 is the main European meeting of the payments industry, and Banking Circle sells payments infrastructure to other financial institutions. At 108 square metres this is a large floor plate in a hall full of them, so the design question was presence at scale without a build that ends in a skip in the Netherlands.
The primary board material is Eco-Board, a panel made from agricultural waste: straw, reeds, wheat, rice, corn, cotton stalks and soybeans. These are crop residues, material that exists whether or not anyone builds a booth out of it. Structural elements are FSC plywood. The floor is Tarkett linoleum, made from natural materials on Cradle to Cradle principles and covered by Tarkett’s ReStart take-back scheme, so the flooring has a defined route off site at breakdown rather than an assumption. Transparent and lit elements are Greencast acrylic, 100% recycled and 100% recyclable after use. Soft elements are Repreve 100% recycled polyester and pure cotton. Production was delivered with Reflekt Group, which put fabrication close to Amsterdam rather than shipping a British-built booth across the Channel.
An overseas show splits into what travels and what is made locally, and that split decides the freight bill, the build window and the footprint at once. Working with Reflekt Group put fabrication near Amsterdam, which took the structure off a cross-Channel freight route. The remaining difficulty on a build this size is specifying unfamiliar board materials to hold a show's worth of handling. Eco-Board and linoleum behave differently from standard MDF and vinyl, so fixing details and edge treatments have to be drawn for the material rather than adapted on site.
Eco-Board from agricultural waste. FSC plywood. Tarkett linoleum with ReStart take-back. Greencast acrylic, 100% recycled and recyclable. Repreve 100% recycled polyester. Pure cotton.