Notes before Paris
What a first international trade fair looks like from six weeks out.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Ventures
We are going to Paris in October. Five days, one pavilion, several thousand buyers who have never heard of us and are not waiting to.
Everyone treats the fair as the event. It is not. The fair is the deadline. Everything that determines whether the trip was worth the money happens in the eight weeks before the plane, and almost none of it is exciting.
The catalogue entry is the first product
Months before anyone sets foot in the hall, there is an online catalogue. Buyers search it, filter it, and build a route through the fair from it. A blank or half-finished entry does not read as mysterious. It reads as a company that is not ready, and the buyer walks a route that does not include you.
It is a text field and a few images and it will do more commercial work than the booth. Fill it in first. Fill it in properly. Then build the booth.
Samples that survive the journey
A sample is not a small version of the product. It is a small version of the product that has to survive a flight, a customs desk, four days on a shelf under hall lighting, and being handled by two hundred strangers.
Which means the sample format is a design problem of its own. Size that a buyer will actually carry back to their hotel. Sealing that survives pressure changes. A label that carries the essential claims without pretending to be retail packaging it is not. And critically, no artwork element that would be illegal or misleading in the market you are standing in.
Check every flag, every claim, every certification mark on a sample against the rules of the country you are showing it in. Not the country you made it in.
That one has bitten us. A badge designed for one market carried an emblem that has no business appearing in Europe. Caught it in proofing. It would have been on five hundred pouches.
Know why you are there
There are three reasons to take a stand at a fair like this and they need entirely different preparation.
To sell now. You need pricing, incoterms, minimum order quantities, lead times and capacity numbers you can state without checking. If a buyer asks what a container costs delivered to Rotterdam and you say you will follow up, the conversation is over.
To be found later. You need the catalogue, the follow-up system, and a way of capturing who stopped by that is better than a bowl of business cards.
To learn the category. You need time away from your own booth, walking competitors'' stands, reading their packaging, noting their price points and their claims. This is the highest-value activity at most fairs and the one everyone skips because leaving your own stand feels like abandoning your post.
Decide which of the three you are doing. A stand built for all three does none of them.
The pavilion problem
Going through a national pavilion is the sensible route for a first-timer. Lower cost, shared infrastructure, a flag that gives buyers a reason to walk down your aisle.
It also means your identity is partly decided by somebody else. Panel dimensions are fixed. Placement is assigned. The story a buyer reads first is the country''s story, not yours. That is a fair trade for a first outing, but only if you design for it deliberately — which means treating your panels as the one surface you fully control, and making sure they say something more specific than the name of the country everyone can already see on the banner overhead.
The real measure
The fair will feel like a success. Fairs always do. Busy days, good conversations, business cards, photographs. Then you fly home and nothing happens for five weeks and you wonder whether it meant anything.
The only honest measure is what exists ninety days later: a sample sent to a named buyer, a specification exchanged, a price quoted, an order in progress. Everything else was a nice week in Paris.