Our industry can be scary. Not necessarily in the Michael Myers, slasher movie sense, but the fear of failure and ruining someone’s event can be psychologically straining. Crystal Knispel, our director of operations here at FrontLine Exhibits, whom many of you have worked with over her 17+ years with the company, comes to me often with potential issues she foresees that keep her up at night (literally). So as we enter the spookiest day of spooky season, I wanted her input on what the biggest haunts are on her end of the business. Here are five areas she honed in on:
Freight
Shipping crates, pallets, and packages all over North America is a daily part of the job and mostly outside of our control. None of Crystal’s fears are unfounded because they’re all things that have happened during her career. Things like crates going missing en route to an event, shipments getting put on rail cars, drivers not showing up, and freight getting left at trade shows have all happened. We’ve done our best to develop a reliable network of shippers, use dedicated shippers, and even put AirTags in our freight to prevent catastrophes.
Deadlines
When you’re dealing with events there is always a hard deadline. There are many chokepoints for deadlines including client delivery of necessary assets (like artwork, products, etc.), production delays, and shipping (talked about above). Crystal’s secret is trying to build in what she calls “fluff days” wherever possible to help give the slightest bit of wiggle room to allow for any mishaps.
Show Site
The show site involves many moving parts, coordinating numerous different people and vendors in a short time. Crystal is great at overseeing and organizing the chaos. Things like crates getting delivered to the wrong boothspace, hanging signs not getting hung, and labor teams not communicating issues are all examples of issues that can occur at the showsite. Making sure we’ve developed the right team of people to oversee both onsite and from afar help us to check all the necessary boxes to ensure the booth is exactly what the client expects by the time the show opens.
Damages
Damages to exhibits and missing parts are a great way to hurt a client’s show. They can arise both on the show floor and during shipping. We’re best when we can control the client’s assets and check pieces and parts on the return from show and before they go back out. Crystal gets photos of the freight where possible to see if something has gone missing or appears damaged when the assets are outside of our control in shipment. She also calls shippers and follows up on deliveries. Inevitably still, we have to use ingenuity from our great labor teams and overnight shipments to patch for missing pieces and parts.
Printing
Printing is another area where any number of things can hurt the image of our client’s booth. Sometimes we have to print lower quality images than we’d like, resulting in a gamble as to whether the image will look good when seen in person. Other times we have critical color matches, or detailed size specifications that we just don’t know until it is setup as to whether it is going to work out. We love to do hard copy printed proofs and setup photos of the final graphics to ensure fit, color and quality ahead of time (but those darn deadlines..).
Crystal is the conductor of many of our clients’ orchestras. Leading the many pieces and parts together to bring a beautiful harmony to their booth spaces. She has developed great experience in identifying potential issues and coming to the team to develop solutions before the problem ever occurs. While she may lose sleep, we’re so glad that her expertise usually solves these issues and they never actually come to be. If you need an experienced team to take these haunts away from your event experiences, please don’t hesitate to contact us!