How to Plan a Trade Show Booth in One Day with a Boot-Strap Budget

By startupprincess | Published March 1, 2007

Ok, first of all, I am NOT recommending this. But, if you have a Trade Show coming up and not a lot of time to plan for it, it is possible. I am amazed. I thought we’d end up with homemade posters and xerox copies.

Here is what we did TODAY for my husband’s business, wholesale works‘ Trade Show booth next week:

  • Met with Let’s Logo and gave them our logo for them to make embroidered polo shirts for the staff at the Trade Show. They have a guarantee that they will be done by Tuesday, hopefully they arrive on-time. This took 1 hour. The shirts are $26, we had a coupon to cover the set up fee. Pretty reasonable for nice customized shirts. His colors are orange and charcoal grey so I thought we should go more conservative, but the girl convinced me the brighter the better for trade shows…so, we’ll be wearing orange shirts and kacki pants.
  • Met with Sign City and their graphic designer, gave them our logo, concept and ordered two signs, one large 4×8 foot banner that has gromits and will hang with S-hooks on our booth and another one that is 21″x 6′ pole system banner; both were under $250. This took 2 hrs. to decide which style signs to use, etc. and what the final copy/text should be. They will give us proofs tonight and we will have them within 2 days, as they are made in-house.
  • Finished up our postcards to handout to the show and we’ll print with OvernightPrints.com where you can get 3,000 postcards for $225.
  • My husband hired another staff member to help with the booth, he found this person at his networking meeting this morning at 7am!
  • We also ordered the carpeting, the electricity, and the draping for the table. This will be around $150.
  • Now I’m writing a letter to send out TOMORROW to 40 current and prospective local clients that will go in a Dell Speaker box with complimentary tickets to the show and say, “Here’s the box, please come and get your complimentary speakers waiting for you at our booth….”; we hope that is a great enticement! We got the speakers for a great deal, so it’s a give-away we can afford to do for our clients.
  • The booth will be full of product–Plasma TVs, Dell computers, etc.

I’m sure there’s lots of other things we’ll need to do over the next several days, but the big issues were done…in 1 day. Phew! Yeah, it’s our first trade show and we’re kind of kicking ourselves at our procrastination. I’m sure next year we’ll do better at planning more in advance.

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2 Responses to “How to Plan a Trade Show Booth in One Day with a Boot-Strap Budget”

  1. Rachael on March 4th, 2007 1:11 pm

    A must for our company is getting magnets to hand out — we go through them like crazy (and they double as our business card) – they’re cute and people won’t mind putting them up on their fridge — Tricky us . . . next time they’re reaching for their milk we’ll be there to remind them to visit our website to find out what’s going on for their family that week!

    We’ve used this at the 3 family expos we attended this month!

  2. startupprincess on March 4th, 2007 9:31 pm

    That works well for your brand. I’m less likely to put a magnet on my fridge for my real estate agent.

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