Notes before Paris
What a first international trade fair looks like from six weeks out.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Ventures
A badge designed for one market carried an emblem that has no business appearing in Europe. We caught it in proofing. It would have been on five hundred pouches.
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. The fair is the deadline. What decides whether the trip was worth the money happens in the eight weeks before the plane, and almost none of it is exciting.
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 reads as a company that is not ready, and the buyer walks a route that does not include us. It is a text field and a few images and it will do more commercial work than the booth, so it gets filled in before the booth gets built.
The samples are a design problem of their own. A sample has to survive a flight, a customs desk, four days on a shelf under hall lighting, and being handled by two hundred strangers. It has to be a size a buyer will carry back to the hotel, with sealing that survives pressure changes and a label that carries the essential claims without pretending to be retail packaging. Every flag, every claim and every certification mark on it gets checked against the rules of the country it is shown in, which is the check the badge failed.
There are three reasons to take a stand at a fair like this, and they need different preparation.
Selling now needs pricing, incoterms, minimum order quantities, lead times and capacity numbers that can be stated without checking. If a buyer asks what a container costs delivered to Rotterdam and the answer is that we will follow up, the conversation is over.
Being found later needs the catalogue, the follow-up system, and a way of capturing who stopped by that is better than a bowl of business cards.
Learning the category needs time away from the booth, walking competitors' stands, reading their packaging, noting their price points and their claims. It is the highest-value activity at most fairs and the one everyone skips, because leaving the stand feels like abandoning a post.
A stand built for all three does none of them.
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 the aisle. It also means the identity is partly decided by somebody else. Panel dimensions are fixed. Placement is assigned. The story a buyer reads first is the country's. The panels are the one surface we fully control, so they have to say something more specific than the name of the country everyone can already see on the banner overhead.
The fair will feel like a success. Fairs always do. Busy days, good conversations, business cards, photographs. Then everyone flies home and nothing happens for five weeks. The 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.