Trade Show Roadkill

Getting your booth to a show can be a road filled with speed bumps and potholes. And as senior director of production services for Global Experience Specialists Inc., it's my job to provide a smooth journey for my exhibiting clients. So when a tractor-trailer accident put my client's exhibit out of commission for the 2010 Fancy Food Show in New York, GES had to build a new custom booth in record time for the show - and turn this rough road into smooth sailing.

My team in Chicago had built a 20-by-40-foot exhibit for Scottish Development International (SDI), a Glasgow, Scotland-based firm that tries to entice companies to set up shop in its home country. The exhibit, which featured some one-of-a-kind structural pieces, had been designed with input from folks in our offices across the country and in the U.K. To keep installation costs under control, many components were built before we shipped the exhibit to New York, so once it arrived at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, it would go up quickly and easily.

During the weeks leading up to the show, all was going well. Four days before the event - a Wednesday - we packed the booth, loaded it onto the tractor-trailer, and bid it adieu. Since the show opened on Sunday, our timeline was tight but right on schedule.

With the booth on the truck headed from Chicago to New York, I pretty much put it out of my thoughts for the day. But that evening, it became my main focal point as I received a call from our shipping partner. It seemed the truck hauling the SDI booth had been in an accident somewhere on a highway in Indiana.

After making sure the driver was OK - and, other than a few minor injuries, he was - I asked about the exhibit. Information obtained on my first phone call to our shipping partner was a bit sketchy, but later that evening it became apparent that the damage to the truck was significant. Furthermore, even if the booth had survived the crash, we weren't about to get our hands on it. The Indiana state troopers had impounded the vehicle and all its cargo as part of the accident investigation.

That last bit of news was the worst. It meant the booth was behind lock and key somewhere in The Hoosier State, and we had just three days to get our client an exhibit of some sort in New York in time to set it up for the opening of the show. While I may have felt like panicking, I knew I needed to keep my cool to have any hope of fixing this mess.

The good news was that most of the SDI booth was made of standard components that we use on a regular basis. The bad news was that in addition to the graphics, there were custom parts that we'd need to remanufacture if we planned to give our Scottish clients a copy of the same exhibit we'd originally built for them.

And, of course, we needed to call the SDI folks and let them know what had happened. Because of the time-zone difference, our first message dropped the bomb of what had occurred and included highlights of our plan to fix it. Since our Scottish customers were in the process of packing and traveling to the show, they told us to do whatever was necessary and that we were on our own to save the day.

When Thursday morning dawned, I had rallied the troops for the emergency. Since the designers at our Chicago office had built the original exhibit, we looked to them to recreate most of the booth in a day, including the standard components and customized flooring.

Next, we called our graphics team in New Jersey, asking them to make new signage for the impounded exhibit. Our U.K. people gave our clients moment-by-moment updates on our progress so they would have peace of mind. Meanwhile, one of my team members in Las Vegas helped me keep all the balls in the air as we juggled this project.

In Chicago, our team had to pull all the parts on the exhibit's inventory list and then do all the prefabrication work we'd done for the impounded structure. This meant assembling major parts of the booth so it would go up quickly in New York - even more quickly than our original tight timeline had dictated.

Plus, all of the teams had their own challenges in addition to the timeline. One of the biggest hurdles was a custom-cut piece that served as a structural centerpiece in the exhibit. The X-shaped element had been made of multiple substrates from several vendors and had taken days to complete. The Chicago office recreated the piece after our vendor partners rush-delivered the materials to us so we could cut the parts to build a new version of that element.

Another problem was the customized flooring, a carpet with the SDI logo cut into the pile. Again, the Chicago office ordered the raw material - carpeting - from the vendor, which rushed the rug to us in a couple of hours. Then we cut the logo pattern into the carpet to the exact standards we used before.

By the end of Thursday, all the items had been pulled, and we were well on our way to rebuilding the exhibit, a process that we finished early the next day. By Friday afternoon, everything was crated up for the trip to New York where the booth would meet up with the graphics constructed in New Jersey. As the truck left the Windy City on Friday, we did more than just wave goodbye; we all prayed for a safe journey.

Well, everything arrived safe and sound in New York on Saturday, and the installation proceeded, but not without a fair bit of clock-watching.

I was naturally concerned that this remake would not fit together properly like its impounded predecessor had. That said, all the rushed elements of the exhibit went together like a jigsaw puzzle, and we finished the booth with mere moments to spare Sunday morning before the show floor opened to attendees.

Much to the surprise and delight of our client, everything was done just as the original blueprints had indicated. The custom-made X-shaped wall element looked just like the renderings. The carpet featured that custom logo. And, best of all, none of the attendees ever knew that an exact duplicate of this booth was incarcerated in an impound lot in the great state of Indiana.

Thanks to a brilliant team and some fast deliveries from our vendors, our roadkill disaster turned into a shining example of how a lot of hard work can transform even the worst of snafus into a client-impressing win.

- Tom Fitzgerald, senior director/production services, Global Experience Specialists Inc., Las Vegas