In the Outhouse

Shipping your booth can be a bit nerve-wracking. You pack everything you need into a truck, and hope some stranger gets it from point A to point B without losing it. Add in a border crossing, and your shipment's trip through customs will likely turn your hair gray.

As the project manager for Connect In Private Corp., an online and mobile privacy- and security-solutions firm, I needed to send my exhibit from our offices in Toronto to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - and I wanted to experience as little gray hair as possible. So I decided to ship only what was necessary, and check the rest of my exhibit as luggage on my flight.

My 10-by-10-foot booth consisted of a back-wall graphic touting a free offer from the company, a reception desk with a wrap-around graphic, a banner stand, some booth literature, and a toilet in a 6-foot-tall Plexiglas box. The box had its own banner with the words, "There is more privacy in here than there is on the Internet" - a tagline meant to demonstrate that communicating online doesn't have the privacy most consumers think it does.

Given my two-pronged shipping strategy, I planned to send the bulky toilet and Plexiglas box via tractor-trailer across the U.S.-Canada border. The rest of the booth was packed in a pair of cases that I checked as luggage. By the time I was ready to fly out of Toronto on Sunday, my shipped items had already made it across the border safely, and I figured my cases were in the belly of the plane. So as I put my cell phone on flight mode, I felt confident that come Monday morning, I'd have everything I needed on the show floor.

When my Air Canada flight landed at McCarran International Airport though, my carefully laid plans started to come apart. It seemed that only one of my booth cases, the one with the reception desk and booth literature, had made the flight. The other case, containing the graphics and banner stand, missed the flight. Being a frequent traveler, I had dealt with lost luggage before, so I filled out the proper form at Air Canada's luggage desk, fully expecting my case to arrive at my hotel by the next morning.

But Monday arrived without my missing case showing up. I called Air Canada periodically throughout the day, but the company had no luck finding my case. Meanwhile, I supervised the union crew as they put together my booth's Plexiglas box with the toilet, and attached the graphic about Internet privacy. But as Monday drew to a close, I realized there wasn't going to be much to do on Tuesday if I didn't have the rest of my exhibit signage.

When I awoke Tuesday morning, there was still no news about my missing luggage from Air Canada. At this point, I started to panic. My entire booth consisted of a toilet in a clear box, a reception desk minus its graphics, and some literature. Worse, a key part of the company's strategy was the back-wall graphic that touted a free trial offer of our service. Without it, we looked like an out-of-place plumbing-fixture company at an electronics show.

With my case still on the lam, I decided to appeal to a higher power to get some added help from Air Canada. After a 20-minute Internet search Tuesday night, I found the direct e-mail address of Calin Rovinescu, the airline's CEO and president, and copied him on all future correspondence I had with the baggage-claim folks.

In my panicked state, I merely asked him and his crew to locate my missing case, and then provided a picture of the item to aid in the search. By Wednesday I was adding, in all capital letters, the plaintive word "HELP!" to the end of my messages. But my case remained lost. Worst of all, I didn't have a way to get the graphics reproduced on the fly, so other than worrying with my fellow co-workers, I didn't have a lot to do.

That night, I brainstormed with my booth staff, taking stock of what we did have on hand. I had the toilet in the Plexiglas box. I had my reception desk - with no graphics. I had my booth staff: two of my co-workers and me. And the three of us had literature to hand out. So we tossed around some ideas on how to cover our missing elements before I headed to bed and slept on those suggestions.

With the case still absent Thursday morning, I arrived at my barren booth space with a plan. The last thing I wanted was for attendees to walk down the aisle, see the sparse space, and make an instant - and erroneous - judgment about the company. So before the show opened, I talked to my co-workers about stepping out into the aisle (hoping show management wouldn't crack down on us) and engaging attendees before they got a good look at our booth. That way, I figured, we'd have a chance to explain what we do, mention the free trial, and give that toilet context.

Using that strategy, the day went well. In fact, our aggressive approach made us pretty successful compared to our goals. Even better, with so many companies cutting back on their booth structures due to the economy, our booth space didn't look too out of place.

Still, I sent another message to Rovinescu and his people Thursday night, telling them that our first day at CES was less than ideal: "Please try harder. The case is either in Toronto or Vegas. I sent you a photo," I wrote. "You just gotta get your hands dirty and walk the floor of the luggage-handling areas until you find it."

Well, my pleading paid off. In an e-mail I received, Rovinescu asked the head of luggage to make finding my case a priority, and on Friday afternoon I received a message from Air Canada that my case had been located. Though my co-workers and I still had to suffer through a second day with the minimalist booth, the case was on its way. After the show floor closed on Friday, we took delivery of the case and hung our graphics for the final two days of CES.

Oddly, I don't think we did any better with attendees when the graphics were in place, mainly because with or without those graphics, we decided not to be complacent on the show floor. And our aggressive new attitude made us better at approaching attendees in the aisles.

In the end, I know I'd rather have had my graphics as I'd originally planned. But I'm not sure I would have tried the aggressive approach if all our signage had arrived on time. I guess my little catastrophe taught me a valuable lesson, though honestly I'd rather learn lessons without the accompanying gray hairs.

- Bill Montgomery, project manager, Connect In Private Corp., Toronto