A marketing coordinator sends an enquiry at four on a Thursday. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, she needs a backdrop, two banner stands and a counter wrap, and the artwork is coming from an agency who have not been briefed yet.
Everything about this job is going to be difficult, and almost all of it was decided before the enquiry was sent.
The teardown: why exhibition print fails
The date cannot move, the artwork arrives last, the person ordering is not the person who made the artwork, and the venue has rules nobody has read. Any one of those is manageable. Together they produce the jobs printers remember for years.
Failure one: artwork supplied wrong
Low resolution files, wrong colour space, missing bleed, text too close to the trim and files built at the wrong scale. Publishing templates per product, with a plain explanation of what is needed, prevents most of it.
Failure two: dimensions that do not match the stand
A shell scheme is not always the size the plan says, and uprights, lighting rails and walls intrude. Asking whether the client has measured the actual stand, rather than trusted the floor plan, saves a backdrop that does not fit.
Failure three: delivery access at the venue
Exhibition venues have delivery windows, stand numbers, loading procedures and often a third-party handling charge. Sending goods without knowing these gets them impounded in a warehouse until after the show.
Failure four: nobody is on site to receive
Deliveries arriving before build-up opens have nowhere to go. Establishing build-up times and who is on the stand determines whether to ship to the venue, the hotel or the client's office.
Failure five: the deadline is not the show date
The real deadline is build-up, which is often the day before, and sometimes two. Working backwards from that, not from opening day, is the only honest way to quote a timescale.
What to ask before quoting
Show name and venue, stand number and dimensions, build-up dates and times, what products are needed, whether artwork exists and in what form, who supplies it and when, whether reusable hardware is wanted and where goods should be delivered.
Publish real cut-offs
The time a file must arrive for each turnaround, and what happens if it slips. A printer who states this plainly is trusted, and one who quietly absorbs late files trains clients to send them late every time.
Price the rush honestly
Overtime, express materials and a courier that runs overnight cost money. Publishing a rush surcharge structure is better than absorbing it or inventing a figure under pressure, which is the approach in rush print jobs and deadline questions.
Reusable hardware changes the conversation
Frames and stands that take replaceable graphics cost more once and less every show afterwards. Explaining this converts a one-off job into a recurring client.
Artwork education pays for itself
The recurring file problems are covered in artwork and file questions printers answer daily.
Account setup should not delay a rush job
New clients arriving in a hurry hit the problem described in trade account applications that stall, and capture at odd hours works much like an AI receptionist for opticians.
Getting started
Publish templates, cut-offs, lead times and what you need for a quote, then capture stand details at any hour. SpideyChat for print and signage companies answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.