Backup Tape

As the president, owner, sales staff, and work force of my own company, Thoughtful Gent Inc., I have to be creative to make my business work. But when the glossy flooring for my first-ever trade show booth turned out to be a hot mess, I needed to dip into that creativity bag one more time to turn an eyesore into a cool conversation piece that would make my modest little booth a big hit among a discerningly crafty crowd.

Given my husband’s expressed disdain for giving and receiving feminine-looking thank-you and thinking-of-you cards, I decided to save his manliness by creating a line of masculine greeting cards for men (or for women to give to men). The idea seemed to take off, but if my little business was to grow, I needed to make some key contacts in the gift and stationery industry. So I decided to exhibit for the first time at the 2009 National Stationery Show in New York.

When I called to reserve my booth space, show management told me that the convention-center floors were polished, black cement. So to cut costs, I decided to bypass rental carpet and simply set up my 10-by-10-foot, booth-in-a-bag display on the bare floor. I figured the concrete would be more than appropriate for my man-centric space, and since it was polished and painted, it would evoke masculinity without looking like a grungy garage floor.

But when I arrived at the Jacob K. Javits Center, I discovered that the polished floors only went so far across the hall. It seems my booth space was about two rows away from the polished cement and in the middle of something that looked like the floor of a bad industrial warehouse.

And while the people at show services were apologetic, they also told me there was nothing they could do. There were no empty booth spaces in nice-floor land. So with a mounting sense of frustration, I decided to head back to my ugly floor space and hope for a little creative inspiration.

Since I could set up my booth in a few minutes, I had a little time to think things over. As I stared at the floor, I began emptying my container of emergency supplies to take stock of what I had on hand, seeing, among other things, a roll of beige masking tape.

Looking back at the sorry state of the convention-center floor, I decided to start by cleaning as much of the caked-on grime as I could. So I made a quick trip to the ladies room for some paper towels and soap. After I scrubbed and scrubbed, and allowed the floor to dry, I took out my masking tape and started laying out long strips in a grid pattern.

As I worked, other exhibitors ogled my flooring project like I was a crazy person. But slowly, my splotched and scuffed piece of real estate began to look like avant-garde art, with the masking-tape grid overlaying the multicolored cement. When I’d finished and set up my booth, even my neighboring exhibitors admired my handiwork.

During the show, many attendees stopped to ask where I’d gotten the cool flooring. Of course, once I had them talking, I could chat about my line of manly greeting cards. I guess it just goes to show that a little creativity and a roll of beige masking tape can fix just about anything.

— Kara Magrin, president, Thoughtful Gent Inc., Aurora, CO



Snow Show

It’s every exhibit manager’s worst nightmare: no booth. But thanks to a team effort, some sympathy from an audiovisual supplier, help from my exhibit house, and quick thinking, I survived that nightmare and fooled my staff into thinking a miracle had ocurred.

It was 5 p.m. Friday, the day before move-in at the March 2009 American Association of Neurological Nurses expo in Las Vegas. As far as I knew, my booth, along with all our graphics, literature, plasma screens, and computers, was already making the trek from our exhibit house in Ohio to Las Vegas in the back of a tractor-trailer. But as I sat at my desk finalizing the last detail, my phone rang.

It was my exhibit house. While I was stalled in my office on a Friday night, it seems my entire exhibit property was stalled in Amarillo, TX, in a snowstorm, believe it or not. I felt like an avalanche was about to hit me — and my program.

I hoped for a quick thaw, but the chances of my 10-by-50-foot in-line booth making it to Vegas in time for the show’s opening was looking like a snowball’s chance in … well, you know.

Nevertheless, my exhibit-house rep and I decided to try and fill our booth space with whatever materials we could find at this late hour. So my rep immediately contacted the show decorator in Las Vegas and sent it our digital graphics files to be replicated.

Meanwhile, I contacted one of my company’s product managers, giving him a heads-up on the quandary we faced so he could warn the booth staff.

The product manager, however, also offered to contact product reps in Las Vegas and ask them to bring their individual tabletop displays, which contained much of the same information as my graphics. If I rented some tables on site, we could use the tabletop displays if my graphics didn’t get reproduced in time. With these wheels set in motion, I called it a night and got ready for my early flight to Vegas the next morning.

When I arrived in Vegas and made my way to the show site, I found out that, yes, the Texas-sized blizzard had kept my booth in Amarillo. The good news, though, was that my backup plan was working.

Our new graphics had arrived, and my booth supervisor was busy punching holes in their corners and hanging them from the pipe and drape with fishing line — meaning I didn’t need the tabletop displays. Plus, the local reps brought along some brochures, which we could use as in-booth literature.

Even better, the show’s AV company had heard my tale of woe and gave me a discount on the rental of some plasma screens and a DVD player. Since I’d brought a duplicate copy of the video we planned to run through our missing computers, I simply popped that disk into the DVD player, hooked it up to the screens, and voila, instant in-booth presentation.

When my booth staff showed up in time for the show’s 6 p.m. opening, they saw the replacement graphics and asked if we’d freed the truck from the snow in Texas. I just smiled and told them that in the face of a freak March snowstorm in Texas, you don’t need a miracle. You just need a great team to help dig you out of trouble.

— Betsy Andrews, medical conferences supervisor, UCB Inc., Smyrna, GA