5 Rules for Exhibiting at a Wholesale Tradeshow

If you are a product-based small business, you may find yourself sending cold outreach emails to retailers, wondering if exhibiting at a wholesale tradeshow would be a good way to boost your profile. It might be! There’s a lot of factors that play into the decision to exhibit, but I’m not going to talk about those today. What I do want to talk about is how to approach exhibiting once you’ve decided to do it.

I have exhibited at three different shows with my risograph stationery business Bromstad Printing Co., and this February I’ll be doing my fourth, back in New York where I started. While I dread tradeshows (that’s also another story), I still do them because they are good for me (like taking your business vitamins — hate to do it, glad to have done it).

I’ve learned a few things along the way that I thought might be helpful to share with other folks who might be doing their first tradeshow this winter. Here are my top five rules for having a successful show.

This is how I found myself exhibiting in a 10’x10’ booth at the Javitz Center for NY Now in August of 2023, a mere 6 months after launching Bromstad Printing Co. full-time. I never did the popular Paper Camp product-based business coaching program, but I did mainline Katie Hunt’s Proof to Product podcast episodes on daily walks the entirety of the spring of 2023.

I was shipping out a couple wholesale orders a week with my 100-card line and figured it would be a great way to jump into a bigger pool of customers. Shoppe Object with its cool, curated aesthetic looked like a neat fit, but I was too late to sign up for their summer market. Instead, I got in touch with NY Now and was quickly onboarded (quickly because, as I would later discover, NY Now was a shrinking show eager for exhibitors).

In the few months between signing up and exhibiting, I compulsively googled example images of other product-based business’s tradeshow booths and worked on creating an engaging design of my own. I decided to go big, tapping a dear handy friend to build me a giant wooden wiggly arch to frame the entrance to the booth, and ordering oversized kitty decals for the walls.

I bought a real coin-operated vending machine that I packed in a giant suitcase I found one day on one of my podcast walks, discarded on the side of the road. Perfect! I did not stop to consider whether it was too much too soon.

Understanding all the exhibitor rules and deadlines was doable, getting all my product to New York was doable with hefty oversize baggage fees (although the wheels did literally fall off the side-of-the-road suitcase at some point in transit back from New York to Atlanta), setting up the booth was doable, especially because I hired union labor to get shelves screwed in the walls and my arch set up. Ultimately, everything was just a series of small (and big) decisions to be executed on. How hard could it be! Then it was just the selling.

I’ve been blessed to have tag-alongs at all three shows I’ve exhibited at so far, whether a spouse or a sister, or for my next show, an art-school-bestie-turned-backend-developer with unlimited PTO. It’s always a bonus if they can hold a paintbrush or know what looks good to help arrange your product, but the more imperative tasks happen once the show is open to buyers.

Your booth buddy is the person who you send with the company card to go get lunch or to flag down buyers when you run to the bathroom for a pee break. They can disappear to fill your water bottle when you are chronically dehydrated, like I was while exhibiting in the arid hellhole that is Las Vegas (although the market itself was very nice).

In a pinch, booth neighbors, who you should also become friendly with, can step in to hand out a card or catalog in your absence. But nothing beats a dedicated boothmate who can sing your praises to buyers and help pass the time during slow periods. It’s best practice to feed and shelter your booth buddy and to purchase their plane ticket if they aren’t local. But friends and family are ideal targets for this role if you, like me, want to avoid paying an hourly rate. The payment is your love!

Never the right amount, that would be absurd. It’s standard practice to never have the right amount.

When I brought 50 I gave away 20.

When I brought 20 I could have easily given away 50.

You’ll always be wrong and that’s why they invented overnight shipping!

So you reserved your booth, you are flying in to a different city and staying in a hotel and eating food all week. It’s already going to cost what it costs. I’m here to tell you, you might as well go all out on making your booth the best booth.

Order the fancy colored carpet from exhibitor services! Or get those floor tiles or a shag rug to delineate your space. And unless it’s part of your brand, you should absolutely plan to paint your booth walls a fun color.

It might feel intimidating, but painting makes a huge difference as far as standing out from the crowd and looking like you put effort in to your space. If you are made of money (I’m not yet) you can pay an obscene amount of it to have the tradeshow people paint yours for you, and it will be all shiny and colorful and ready to go once you arrive to set up. But what I’ve done at most of my shows is plan to arrive a half day early, stop at the paint store on the way from the airport while single-handedly hauling four suitcases of tradeshow shit, stuff the gallon of paint between a duffle bag and the handle of a roller bag, and go straight to the market to paint.

I bring my own roller and disposable paint tray in my suitcase and toss them when I’m finished. Tradeshows are so inherently wasteful in many ways but you’ve got to choose your battles; you do not need to find the one utility sink in the Javits to clean your roller, just toss it, it’s OK.

With one exception when I did a nice medium blue, I’ve gone with a saturated stop sign red for my booth walls a couple times now and it’s become my go-to choice. I get the red carpet from exhibitor services that they install for you, and combined, they make an eye-catching, color-drenched backdrop for my product.

It’s always interesting to see what colors other brands go for at all the shows. I’ve seen lots of soft blues and millennial pinks in the past, but my bright red is always a standout. Choose something that will fit with your product to make it the centerpiece.

This is the most important rule, so choose your cry wisely.

If you’ve embodied rule 1 (“How hard could it be?”) and gone all in on rule 4 (Treat Your Booth) you may find yourself in a situation where you suddenly feel over your head. There will certainly be unforeseen circumstances that test your patience and decision-making capacity.

Perhaps it is that the lights you brought to illuminate your beautiful product can’t clamp on the hardwalls because the walls are too thick and now you are stuck under the one shadowy zone of Las Vegas Market that lacks overhead lighting and besides, the electric is run to the bottom of your booth and not the top and now the tradeshow services electrician is shrugging his shoulders as if to say “You’re on your own, kid.”

Maybe you made it through set-up flawlessly but now it’s 9:00 am on the first day of the show and the floor is opening and you’ve never done a wholesale tradeshow before and buyers are beginning to filter through the aisles and you’re freaking out just a little bit that you’re really here and how could this possibly be happening (you are an introvert for Chrissake) and what if you fail and everyone hates you??

You can cry a little.

Just a few tears though. Wipe them away and let your booth buddy give you a little pep talk about your unreasonably high standards. Let your booth neighbors reassure you that things look great, that you will do great!

They are right! It’s going to be OK! It will be an exercise in social endurance and self-acceptance. But follow these five rules for exhibiting at a wholesale tradeshow and you are golden.