Exhibition Stand
Planning Guide.

Shell scheme, modular, or custom build

Three options, and the choice is usually made for the wrong reason — appearance — when it should be made on space, reuse and schedule.

Shell scheme is the organiser's own structure: walls, fascia, basic lighting, a name board. Cheapest, fastest, and visually identical to the stands either side of it. Appropriate when the objective is presence rather than impression, and when the space is small enough that a custom build would not change how the stand reads anyway.

Modular systems use a reusable frame with printed graphic infills. Faster to install than custom, reusable across several shows, and far cheaper per appearance if you exhibit more than once or twice a year. The limitation is form: the system's geometry shows through whatever you print on it.

Custom build is fabricated for the space. It is the only route to a double-decker, a genuinely enclosed meeting room, an unusual form, or a heavy working exhibit. It carries the longest lead time, the most approval documentation, and the highest cost — and it is the only option that lets the stand do something the hall has not seen before. Exhibition stands covers what a custom build involves end to end.

The exhibitor manual and its deadlines

Every organised exhibition issues an exhibitor manual. It is the governing document for your stand and it is routinely skimmed. Read it first and extract the dates into your own schedule, because they are not negotiable and they do not arrive as reminders.

• Stand design submission. Drawings and elevations by a fixed date, often with a maximum height and a rule on how much of the perimeter may be solid wall.
• Structural approval submission for anything above a stated height, double-decker, or suspended.
• Contractor registration. Your build contractor must be registered with the organiser, with insurance documentation, by a cut-off.
• Rigging and suspension requests. Points are finite and allocated in order. Late requests are refused, not accommodated.
• Power, water and compressed air orders. Ordered in advance at one rate and on site at a much higher one, if at all.
• Internet and connectivity orders. Dedicated lines need lead time; venue wi-fi is not a demonstration platform.
• Build and dismantle access windows. With vehicle marshalling slots that have to be booked.
• Health, safety and method statements where the organiser requires them.

Note which deadlines are set by the organiser and which by the venue; they are often different parties with different cut-offs.

Structural approvals and documentation

Anything structural — a raised floor with a significant step, a tall wall, a suspended element, a second storey — needs engineering documentation submitted and approved before it is built, and the approval window is routinely longer than the fabrication window.

The planning consequence is the one organisers miss most often: build the schedule backwards from the show date and insert the approval window at its real length, then see what is left for design and fabrication. Scheduling fabrication from the date the design is signed off internally is how a stand ends up being built while its approval is still pending.

Keep the documentation set together: stamped drawings, structural calculations, material specifications and fire certificates for finishes, insurance certificates for every contractor on site, and the organiser's approval correspondence. On a busy build floor the ability to produce a document on request is what keeps a stand working rather than stopped.

Designing for the hall, not for the render

A stand render is drawn from the best angle in an empty hall. Visitors arrive at the worst angle in a full one. Five practical adjustments close most of that gap.

• Design for the approach, not the elevation. Identify which aisle carries the traffic and what is visible from twenty metres away down it. High elements and the brand name do their work at that distance; detail does not.
• Keep the perimeter open where traffic flows. A stand sealed by solid walls on its busy sides reads as closed, whatever is inside. Visitors will not enter a space they cannot see into.
• Plan circulation for two populations. People browsing past and people staying for a conversation need different space, and the second group should not have to stand in the first group's path.
• Design right-to-left and left-to-right. Bilingual graphics change where the eye enters a panel, which changes where the logo, the headline and the product should sit. Doing this at design stage costs nothing; doing it after artwork approval costs a reprint.
• Light the product, not the ceiling. Hall ambient light is high and flat. Stand lighting earns its cost by creating contrast on what you want looked at.

For technically demanding builds, the work OnePass delivered on the World Defense Show — an Al Jubail corvette mockup — is cited here as fabrication and exhibition-build proof, not as sector experience in your industry. The transferable part is engineering a large, approved structure inside an exhibition hall's constraints.

Stand services you have to order

• Power. Calculated in kilowatts from the actual load — lighting, screens, machines, catering equipment, chargers — with a margin, and with the distribution position fixed on the plan.
• Rigging. Point positions and weights, submitted early, with a ground-supported alternative designed in case the points are refused.
• Connectivity. A dedicated line if anything on the stand demonstrates software or streams.
• Water and waste for any catering, coffee or sampling function.
• Daily cleaning for the stand and its carpet, which is ordered separately from the hall's cleaning.
• Storage. Somewhere for literature, giveaways, crates and personal bags that is not the meeting area.
• Furniture and plants, ordered rather than assumed, with quantities checked against the final layout.

Build week

Build floors are shared, congested and governed by the clock. The sequence matters more than the hours available.

Rigging goes in before anything is built underneath it, because the hall's lifts have to reach the floor. Then structure, then electrical first fix, then surfaces and finishes, then technical equipment, then dressing, graphics and product. Reversing any two of those creates rework, and rework on a build floor is paid at overtime.

Three checks before you leave the hall on the final build day: every graphic read and proofed by someone who has not seen it before, every screen and demonstration run end to end, and a walk of the stand from the aisle in — standing where a visitor will stand, not where the designer stood. What happens before guests arrive covers the build-week sequence in more detail.

Staffing the stand

• Headcount by shift, not by day. Exhibition days are long and a tired stand performs visibly worse after hour five.
• Language mix matched to the audience, with Arabic and English cover on every shift.
• Roles defined. Who qualifies a visitor, who demonstrates, who handles a serious enquiry, who owns the lead capture.
• Lead capture method chosen and tested before the doors open, with a paper fallback.
• A briefing before day one covering the products, the three questions staff will be asked most, and what to do with an enquiry they cannot answer.
• Breaks rostered, so nobody leaves the stand unattended by improvisation.

Dismantle and reuse

Dismantle is contracted to a standard and to a window, usually at night, and the hall will charge for anything left behind. Agree the standard in writing before build, including who removes carpet and waste.

If you exhibit more than once a year, design for reuse from the start: a frame that travels, graphics that are reprinted rather than rebuilt, and a storage plan that includes labelled crates and a condition check on return. A custom stand built with no reuse plan is a one-show asset, and that should be a deliberate choice rather than something discovered at dismantle.

OnePass designs, fabricates and installs exhibition stands in Saudi Arabia and handles the organiser documentation that goes with them. Exhibitions and conferences covers the show-level scope around the stand.