Stories
Based in the suburb of Crumlin in south Dublin, W Display is one of Ireland’s leading exhibition, design and display companies. Established almost 30 years ago, W Display specialises in exhibition and event management and display – creating bespoke display and exhibition stands for exhibitions, trade shows and conferences such as Holiday World, The National Ploughing Championships and Showcase here in Ireland and World of Coffee in Europe. The company has worked for Bord Bia, RTÉ, Bloom, Intel and Dyson to name a few.
Movement Events was established five years ago as a sister brand to W Display in order to tap into growing requests from brands to create displays for pop-up shops, outdoor events and experiential events such as product launches. Recent projects for Movement Events include the fit out of the Design Ireland shop at Dublin Airport, the new Gym + Coffee store at Kildare Village and a Smile Direct Club pop-up shop in the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre.
Aoife Smith is a director at W Display and at Movement events where she is Head of Client Services. “I think the fatigue of the whole period is setting in now – it feels like it’s been a constant slog for the past few months,” says Smith. “I think we all thought by now that we might have some clarity on a restart date for trade shows but it’s the unknown that is starting to weigh on people – what we are looking at for next year? Trade shows are very different to mass events so it’s very frustrating that they’re not being treated as such.”
Last year was one of the company’s best trading years and 2020 looked set to beat it. “We kicked off the year with Showcase and were heading into a busy period with trade shows in Europe to work on. In the space of about four weeks our entire calendar of shows was cancelled,” says Smith.
“We do World of Coffee, we had the London Coffee Festival coming up and several other shows in Europe which were pulled in the space of a week. Other events including pop-up shops were cancelled. We went from having a full book to having nothing in a matter of days.”
This situation led to almost all of the 42 staff members being let go aside from a couple of key managers to “keep the doors open” as the company was looking at an empty diary. The small team began to consider how the skills of their staff members could be utilised in a different way and they quickly turned their hands to creating work from home solutions such as flatpack desks which could be delivered to people’s houses.
As plans began for salons, hairdressers and larger stores to reopen, the team of designers, carpenters and fabricators began to be rehired in order to create screens and other solutions to help businesses with Covid-19 restriction requirements.
Some 25 people had been re-employed at the time of writing. “Within two and a half weeks we decided that we needed to change things around and to launch new products in order to keep the business going,” explains Smith.
“We wanted to come out with something design-led that our talented workforce could produce. The WFH desks took off really quickly – we had corporate customers coming to us ordering in bulk for staff and members of the public buying via our social media drive.”
Movement Events then began to get calls from previous clients seeking screens and other Covid-19 measures. As they began to promote this service online, they were tasked with creating free-standing screens and stickers for salons, restaurants, dental surgeries, offices, retail spaces and hotels in preparation for reopening. They also worked on the bathrooms in Jervis Shopping Centre and the customer service desks at Dundrum Town Centre enable them to comply with public health requirements.
“We had a lot of big orders which was great. We pounded the pavements and made phone calls to existing clients. A lot of it was word-of-mouth and our reputation that got us more business,” says Smith. “We looked abroad to see what companies in Europe were doing particularly in the restaurant space. After that it was industry telling us what they needed – particularly in the hair and beauty sectors.”
The company is still producing some Covid-19 screens and signage but the need for these has lessened as the various sectors have opened up. Continuing to innovate, they have now begun to appeal again to the WFH market and have produced a “pod” which can be installed in people’s gardens as home offices.
These pods start at just under €10,000 but, despite the price tag, they have hit their target of producing six per month since they launched. “It’s important for us to keep coming up with solutions for problems that people have. We have noticed a lot of goodwill towards businesses that are being creative and solution-driven,” Smith says.
W Display is going over 25 years and it is not the first recession that the company has seen. This time, however, it is the speed at which changes occurred, the blanket bans on mass gatherings, travel bans and uncertainty which have created the greatest challenges for the company.
“There’s a big push at the moment to have trade events separated from mass events.”
Aoife Smith
“Through previous recessions we still had our core work such as the National Ploughing Championships, Showcase or the Ideal Home Show,’ says Smith. “We’ve never seen these big events, that have been going for a long time, being cancelled. While some years might have been leaner than others we could always plan and had big exhibitions in the diary year-to-year. It is difficult to know also how international events will go. We have one in the diary for next February which we hope will go ahead but it’s difficult to know at this point if people will travel.”
Despite fears that this year’s pivot to digital will herald the end of the trade fair or convention in the same way that Napster and subsequent streaming platforms caused consternation in the music industry, Smith says that there is no comparison between the experience of a real live trade fair or exhibition and that of an online experience in terms of the connections that are made and the business that is done.
“I think there will always be a need for the physical trade show. At Showcase, for example, it’s vital for people to see products, meet people face-to-face. I don’t think you will ever replace the physical trade show experience and it’s vital for business that the physical experience comes back. Events like the Wedding & Honeymoon Show and the Future Beauty Show are also vital for so many small businesses. I don’t think they can be replaced by digital events in the long term.”
Smith says that for this to happen it is essential that such events are separated out from other large events such as concerts and festivals in terms of government restrictions and guidelines. “There’s a lot of work being done at the moment around how a trade show can be done safely. They are very different to mass events such as festivals – the numbers can be managed very easily and social distancing is much more manageable,” says Smith. “There’s a big push at the moment to have trade events separated from mass events. We are hopeful that such events will return from around February next year but, in the meantime, we are also diversifying our business as best we can.”
