Reach your goal faster, don’t waste precious time.

I am the founder of Fastand and have extensive experience in the international trade show industry. I created and invented modular, customizable trade show booths: I invite you to read some tips I can give you to create a perfect trade show booth that will bring you satisfaction and, above all, great market recognition.

I hope this page can help you even if you don’t choose to purchase a Fastand booth.

Where are we going ?

In my opinion, within a few years we will arrive at a different concept of trade shows, with events dedicated to doing business and not events dedicated to corporate image where all that matters is showing how big and powerful you are in the market. I have never understood the point of inviting active clients to a trade show and feeding them; this only serves to boost attendance numbers and only benefits the organizing entity.

Wouldn’t it be better to invite non-client companies and show them the innovations, technology, and quality of the company? For this, you don’t need large booths but only well-studied, designed, and organized ones.

The solutions we have perfected over time are designed to help a company that has these values as the foundation of its market.

1 Booth design capable of attracting visitors and users

First and foremost, I place style and booth design. Why? Because it’s through design that you can immediately stand out among the various booths at the trade show. Design can characterize you and make you unique, giving the booth an unmistakable, high-quality look. Creating a unique, custom-made project for your company or product is our mission; unique to pre-built systems that lower costs and make the booth ALWAYS modular and customizable, you can create unique and inimitable situations. Since its inception, Fastand has created and developed systems capable of making any exhibition format easy to set up by anyone, in all its parts and completely independently.

The exhibit as a construction philosophy is the foundation of noble design capable of solving all problems related to setup and dismantling speed.

2 Trade show booth color

I recommend creating a strong, representative splash of color to immediately stand out from other trade show booths. If I’m a user hastily visiting a trade show, I’m bombarded by colors, images and logos, advertising and shapes, but I’m always attracted by a strong, unambiguous splash of color, whatever it may be. So when asked whether a photo or a color is better on a trade show booth, I believe color prevails, because the photo will never have the visual power to attract me like a sharp, decisive color.

The next day I’ll remember the all-yellow booth, but I’ll never remember the photo that was positioned on a trade show booth.

3 Size doesn’t matter, but quality and details do

In my experience as a trade show booth designer, I can guarantee that I have created small booths that are much more captivating than large booths, which are always very dispersive and difficult to compare in terms of visual impact.

I love designing small spaces that try in every way to surpass large booths. I remember Fastand’s Paris experience with a very small booth of only 3×3 meters but 5 meters high that stood out above all other larger booths; our booth was extremely busy and had a very strong appeal, as if to say “good wine comes in small bottles.”

It’s the perceived details of the booth that make the difference, not the large dimensions, especially in a trade show environment where users are continuously attracted by noises and colors. If we can stop them at the booth, then it will be essential to have a very high level of perceived overall quality so that consequently our product-service also has the same level of perception.

4 Booth height at the trade show

Increasingly essential. My advice is to create small booths, trying to maximize the height of the structure.

People’s eyes are not trained to read trade show spaces based on square footage, but on the overall visual impact (front + depth + height).

At trade shows, the rule is the bigger it is, the more important it is: make the heights visible and people’s eyes will read large spaces. This is the trick I’m revealing to you.

The higher the booth, the smaller the things inside it will appear, and therefore the eye will read them as things of great importance, giving your trade show setup maximum perceived value.

Because it’s always about perception and not reality. Time is short and people are confused by noises, colors, and novelties. So remember: perception as absolute value.

5 Communicate a single concept or product simply and directly

I’m aware that your company, like mine, has a whole range of products and potential, but those in front of us don’t have time and in many cases don’t even want to know everything right away. Let’s keep this aspect in mind and play it smart: let’s show a few things, ideally just one novelty and that’s it, so that users can remember us and discover all the other available options at a later time. But only at a later time.

I know it’s very difficult to make this kind of reasoning, I know it firsthand, but it’s necessary to have a positive result at the trade show.

It’s also necessary to be able to change the graphic design from time to time, targeting the message to the type of visitor. I’ve seen booths in Germany with writing in Italian or Spanish, or booths with graphics completely wrong for the type of audience but recycled from other trade shows, without understanding at all that for a message to be complete it must belong to the person visiting the trade show, otherwise it’s worthless, as if it were written in another language.

6 Lighting

Saying that light is important may seem obvious and banal. I’m not saying that booth lighting should always be excessive and strong; it depends on the product, the trade show, the user, and what I want to highlight: playing with light is important to complete the reasoning on how to attract potential customers.

In all the other blogs I’ve read about increasing lighting regardless, and this is absolutely wrong. Lighting must be studied based on the booth and the product being displayed.

Warm light? Cold? Ambient? High, low, or colored? It depends. It depends on the message I want to convey and the impact the booth design wants to create.

If my product is brass, I certainly can’t use cold light, but at most ambient or preferably warm. Conversely, if a product is related to the technological world, it’s better to use cold light, linked to blue tones, to give an even greater sense of technical and current.

7 Make customers always feel important but free to view the novelties.

Let’s be careful not to be too formal or too informal. The booth visitor is a potential customer, not your friend but not your enemy either. Let’s try to provide all the assistance requested, but only if requested.

At the trade shows I’ve visited, I’ve witnessed many behavioral errors, such as immediately asking if information is needed, following the customer in all their movements as if they wanted to steal some hidden secret, and overly formal salespeople who ask for sensitive company data even before entering the booth. We need to be present at the booth but let’s try to make the potential customer-visitor feel comfortable and not treat them like a number.

8 Let’s avoid useless storage in our trade show booth

Too many times I’ve created storage areas that seemed absolutely essential, only to discover they were used to store the jackets and bags of the people manning the booth. Enough. You lose useful space, you create dead corners that are ugly to see and difficult to hide. They’re not needed. And when I see 1×1 storage areas with folding doors in the booth that are really unacceptable for the current type of trade show, I really don’t understand why (the only reason that comes to mind is that renting storage from the trade show entity has a good value).

The one-square-meter storage area only serves to be able to get inside, and the shelf inside is so small that we can integrate it into the reception desk or create an equipped access compartment that can be locked. But does creating a storage area where the only thing that fits is a person really represent a must for a small trade show booth?

9 Respect customers’ time, the trade show is large

There are various types of visitors: we can’t expect everyone to have the same care in listening or interest in our product, and we certainly can’t expect them to. We must try to explain without insistence and above all without making those who approach our trade show booth feel obligated to explanations. If we enter a store and the salespeople are too persistent in asking if we need something, we feel annoyed and in all likelihood we won’t buy anything and will leave with no desire to return in the future. Remember that the visitor doesn’t owe explanations for why they’re attracted to our product or even if they stop to watch a video; it could just be curiosity and not real business-level interest.

10 Increase the frequency of events and trade shows

For years I’ve been witnessing a strong, clear change in the behavior of trade show organizing entities. Little by little they are adapting to different ways of seeing trade shows, more American-style and increasingly resembling meetings and less and less resembling the “trade show” we’ve been accustomed to seeing in recent years.

But now you have a modular, customizable trade show booth, what are you waiting for!

Smaller square footage of trade show booths: spaces to contain costs and especially time dispersion of users (visitors no longer want to waste too much time visiting a trade show)

More specialized trade shows and less container of a bit of everything

Duration always shorter (we’re seeing 3-day trade shows and no longer 5-day ones)

Locations non-traditional for us Europeans such as hotels, convention centers

GO! It’s time to discover our 3 trade show systems