When events dried up and revenue stopped seemingly overnight, The Trade Group Inc., a Carrollton, TX-based exhibit house, felt the need to pivot quickly in order to keep employees working. With the initial surge of COVID testing sites, temporary hospitals, and triage centers, The Trade Group began working up solutions to meet those needs. However, the company watched the demand for additional medical facilities fizzle and searched for other ways to assist.

Malcolm Gilvar, vice president of sales for The Trade Group, read an article in the Dallas Morning News about how offices were going to need protective dividers and other solutions to open back up, so the company redirected its efforts again. "That was on a Monday," Gilvar said. "By Wednesday we had a sell sheet, and we were doing a full training for the sales team. So we literally pivoted in the span of a couple days and had some basic designs." Over the ensuing weeks, those design solutions continued to morph, offering more and more creative and aesthetic options.

The company continued mining its resources to find innovative ways to help companies. For instance, Gilvar and his team recognized that hand sanitizer and dispensers were becoming almost impossible to acquire. "One of my sales guys has a contact in the soap business, and we were able to secure a relationship in China," Gilvar said. "We have 12,000 dispensers that we are providing along with hand sanitizer gel. Now we are in the hand sanitizing business!" The Trade Group has sold brandable and generic dispensers and gel to all sorts of organizations ranging from the city of Dallas (near the company's headquarters) to churches to industrial companies. Initially the company was selling a few units at a time, but now it's filling orders in the thousands.

Gilvar read another article about the requirements for restaurants and salons to reopen, so The Trade Group immediately developed new lines of safeguards to address those growing needs. "Demand was slow to begin with, but now we're getting orders on a daily basis," Gilvar said. "And honestly it's been a lifeline. It's a big difference-maker for us."

"Our strength is as a design organization," Gilvar added. "Our goal, as we began designing these products, was to provide customers a product they are proud to have in their businesses, so it wasn't just a white piece of plastic. And that is what our industry brings to the table – that creativity and knowhow. It is uniquely positioned to produce and deliver these types of products." Reflecting on how the company's employees have responded to this challenging time, Gilvar said he couldn't be prouder of them – they are 100-percent behind the company's efforts. Even better, the exhibit house is beginning to work on projects for the fall as trade shows and events are slowly-but-surely beginning to reboot. "All this work has been a bridge to get us back to the point where events come back strong," he said.