New Ideas – Keep Them Coming

Every year we attend PMMI’s main packaging trade show in either Las Vegas or Chicago. We are always looking for new ideas to make our booth stand out from the rest and portray a ‘professional’, ‘high tech’ look. Several years ago we decided to ‘go green’ and do away with the expensive and wasteful carpet rental. In its place we purchased laminate ‘oak’ flooring. We are able to re-use the flooring at each show by putting it down (the planks snap together) and taking it back up at the end of the show. It has saved us thousands of dollars in rental and saved the environment from all the thrown away carpet at the end of the show.

We also came up with the idea of putting up vertical blinds in the back of the booth as opposed to the wrinkled curtains the show hangs up. We built our own stands to hold them and they worked well for several years. We discovered that the blinds are not as re-use ‘friendly’ as we had hoped as the blinds tend to break at the top after one or two uses and they get bent if not carefully handled. So this year we wanted a ‘new look’. We contacted several show houses and display companies. They were all offering one version or another of the new stretch material with graphics printed on it. I subscribe to ‘Exhibitor’ magazine and scoured the photos of other exhibits to get new ideas. We brought in some other employees to ‘pick their brains’ as to what we could do differently for the back of our booth.

Read my next blog to find out what great idea we came up with after a brainstorming session of individuals from different departments.

The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading packaging machinery manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at http://www.neminc.com/.