Design, production, project management and sustainability sit in the same business. The person specifying a material is in the same building as the person who has to make it work on a show floor at six in the morning.
Every exhibitor has had the experience of approving a beautiful visual and standing in front of something that is not quite it. The lighting is flatter. The finish is cheaper. The detail that sold the idea has quietly gone.
That gap is almost always a handover problem. The design was done by people who never have to build it, and the build was done by people handed a drawing and a budget that no longer matched.
We do both. Our designers sit in the same building as the workshop, the modular stock and the production team, which means a design gets tested against what can actually be made, in what material, in the time available, before it goes to you.
On the Burberry Floating Meadow we can show the technical elevation, the design visual and the finished photograph of the same object. Three stages, one team.
2,866 square feet in Feltham, west London, running on on-site solar plus a 100 percent renewable tariff.
Modular stock. Aluvision, BeMatrix and Octanorm. The three systems that matter, held as our own inventory, not hired in.
A woodworking department producing bespoke items from materials that meet our own criteria.
Audiovisual kit and rental furniture, both held in stock.
Spray and paint facilities, so a refinish between shows happens here rather than being priced as a new build. And the CAD studio, on the same site as the machines.
Keeping all of that in-house is what gives us control. When something needs to change at short notice, and on a show build it always does, it changes here.
The one thing we do not do ourselves is print. That goes to print partners we have vetted, in the country the show is in, because printing near the venue beats shipping graphics across a continent on both cost and carbon.
Our visualisers work in Unreal Engine and SketchUp, and we present in D5 Render, which means a design can be adjusted live on a client call rather than going away for a week and coming back.
We are building a component library off our own rental inventory, so when a designer moves a wall in a presentation they are moving a wall we own and can price immediately. Most agencies are designing in the abstract and finding out what it costs afterwards.
Build labour tells the story first. A skilled two-person crew assembles a six by three metre booth in a few hours. A custom build often takes a full day or more, and show-floor labour is charged by the day.
The carbon argument runs alongside it rather than against it. Primary aluminium carries around 16 to 17 kg CO2e per kilogram. Recycled aluminium is around 0.8, because remelting uses roughly five percent of the energy of smelting new metal. An extrusion system redeployed for a decade is a different object from a frame built once.
The second year is where it shows. The frame is already paid for, so what you are buying is graphics and labour rather than a building.
One thing to watch for, because it is sold as a credential: aluminium composite panel, Dibond or ACM, is not aluminium in this sense. It is a plastic and aluminium sandwich and the layers cannot practically be separated at end of life.
We hold a register of 203 materials we have assessed ourselves. Each entry records recycled content, whether it is genuinely natural, whether it is VOC free, whether embodied carbon has been calculated, what certification it carries, and what happens to it at end of life.
Certification is recorded specifically rather than generally, and end of life is recorded down to whether a material is compostable domestically or only industrially. The about page has the full breakdown.
We keep the ones that fail, and why. Knowing what not to specify is worth as much as knowing what to specify, and it is the difference between a materials library and a mood board. We hold physical samples of most of them, so a design conversation happens with the thing in your hand.
UK and European shows are produced in our own workshop, by our own people. Everywhere else we work through a partner network of more than 120 partners across 27 cities and four continents. Every one has been interviewed and checked against our own supplier requirements. A booth built badly in Chicago still has our name on it.
Our Design Director has spent close to twenty years in event and retail design, including as a brand lead inside one of the largest drinks groups in travel retail, so he has sat on the client side of this conversation. Our production lead has twenty-two years in the trade show industry. Our founder has twenty-two. More on the team is on our about page.
We work with brands running booth programmes across multiple shows and multiple years, where design decisions repeat and doing them properly compounds. Our clients include CBRE, Pernod Ricard, Burberry, Red Bull and Bloomberg.
The Capital One Greenhouse is a good example of a design that looks unbuildable and then got built. Thirty-one projects are in our case studies, and the argument for reuse is set out on sustainable exhibition stands.
Both, in the same building. Design, production, project management and sustainability are four functions of one business, not four suppliers co-ordinated by you.
Aluvision, BeMatrix and Octanorm, held as our own stock rather than hired in. That means we can price a redeployment rather than a rebuild.
Yes, in our own workshop, and we do where a project genuinely needs it. We just do not pretend most projects need it, because a custom build is the most expensive and highest-carbon way to solve most briefs.
Carbon figures are indicative, produced with our own in-house methodology and not independently audited. Third-party verification can be arranged on any project.
You will get a design, and the carbon and cost comparison against what you are building now, inside ten working days. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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