Thirty Thousand Dollars and Five Brands: What We Learned From Our First Beauty Expo Stand

I have walked Beauty Expo Australia as an attendee, and I have stood on its stages as a speaker, but this year was the first time I stood behind a stand of my own. I wanted to write the honest version of how that went, largely because I went looking for exactly this article before we signed anything and could not find it.

What follows sits inside four questions I ask after every project. What we loved, what we learned, what lacked, and what I longed for. There is a real number at the end, because the number is the part everybody talks around.

What we loved

Inside Industry was not at Expo for Inside Industry. We consult to some of the largest brands in the professional channel, and brands at that level invest at a scale that buys them prime position on the show floor, which is fair enough. We also consult to a lot of smaller brands, and the thought of watching them take a one metre by one metre unbranded stand pushed against a side wall did not sit right with me.

So we did it differently. We bought a larger space with real foot traffic, positioned beside the conference halls and across from the major names, and then sublet that space to five of our smaller brand partners. We chose an open floor plan with nothing closing us in, which made it easy for anybody walking past to step straight through.

The part I loved most had very little to do with the stand itself. It was the months of communal preparation we did as a group before anybody set foot in Sydney, and the sense on the day that these brands were sitting in the middle of the room together rather than competing for scraps at the edge of it.

I also loved the popcorn. We ran the machine from ten until three across both Saturday and Sunday, and I lost count of the number of people who arrived saying they could smell it from the other side of the hall and followed their nose over. It is a small and slightly ridiculous tactic that outperformed almost everything else we did to pull people in.

My own presence on stand mattered more than I had expected. A meaningful number of people came over because they wanted to meet me, take a photo, ask a question about something I had written, or carry on a conversation that started online. Having a known voice physically on stand, for a sustained block of time, brings traffic and awareness in a way that a beautiful stand on its own will not.

The floor was busy, busier than I had expected, and it left me feeling that Expo is returning to something closer to what trade shows were built for in the first place. It is becoming a place of brand discovery again, particularly for brands entering the market or accelerating their awareness and acquisition.

What we learned

When you buy a stand you are buying floor space and very little else, which means the walls, the flooring, the power, and the internet all sit outside that number and have to be bought separately. Whatever budget you have landed on, double it before you commit to anything.

The second lesson cost me far more in stress than it did in money. We are Melbourne based and the show is in Sydney, which changes the logistics of every physical item you order. Ordinarily you would have signage and props delivered to you and then transport them yourself, but interstate you need to order early enough that suppliers can ship directly to the venue, otherwise you are paying to freight everything twice and handling it twice.

Some of our signage did not arrive. Our display shelving did not arrive either, which meant a stressful last minute scramble sourcing replacement furniture in a city that was not mine, hours before the doors opened.

What lacked

The hardest part of being a first-time exhibitor was the fragmentation of the process. You sign your space and your contract with the organisers, and then you buy your internet from one supplier, your power from another, your furniture from a third, and your signage from a fourth, each with a different portal, a different deadline, a different point of contact, and a different set of assumptions about what you already know.

The consequence for us was that our flooring went down before our internet could be wired in, which meant our internet could not be wired in at all.

Anybody who has exhibited for years will read this and find it second nature, and it probably is. For somebody standing up their first stand, having everything the organisers sell you visible in one place, with the sequence and the timing laid out, would remove an enormous amount of avoidable friction.

What I longed for

More promotional support from the show itself. The online directory is useful and the exhibitor book is useful, though both reach a relatively small proportion of the people actually walking the floor.

What I would have longed for is exhibitor spotlights across the show's own social channels in the three months leading in, for every exhibitor regardless of package size, along with better email campaigns built around the brands attendees are going to discover when they arrive. It may well be that this sits behind a spend threshold, in which case it would help enormously to have that spelled out at the point of signing.

I want to be careful here, because none of this removes the obligation on brands to run their own campaigns. We absolutely should, and we did. When you are investing this much into a show, it is reasonable to expect the show to help you tell the market you will be there.

The number

I went in with a projected budget of fifteen thousand dollars. It cost just over thirty.

That gap is what happens when things go wrong close to the date and money becomes the only available solution, which is a lesson every event organiser in history has learned the hard way. Our five brand partners paid three and a half thousand dollars each for their place on that stand, and the difference between what they contributed and what the weekend actually cost came out of Inside Industry. That was a decision I made at the outset, and they will read this article and see the real figure for the first time.

To the five

KausmediTech, On Sundays, Dermal Code, Skin Functional, and Juliette Armand. Thank you for the grace and the trust involved in putting your brands on somebody else's stand. Watching how busy each of you were across those two days was the best part of the weekend.

If you are thinking about it

Do it. Go in with double the budget you think you need, order your physical items months earlier than feels sensible, map every supplier and every deadline into one document before you sign anything, and if there is a way to share the space with brands you believe in, take it.

We would do it again, but we would do it very differently.

Photography by Keira Maloney - The Salon Photographer