Thinking about InstallerSHOW 2027? It runs 22-24 June 2027 at the NEC Birmingham, and it’s the UK’s biggest show for the installation industry. It’s also the show where rival stand builders walk the floor and think, that looks good. What starts as a blank hall becomes a creative hotbed over three very busy days. That’s brilliant to be part of, but it raises the bar: if you’re exhibiting, you need to put something out there that’s relevant, easy to understand and interesting enough to make someone stop.
We built six trade stands across InstallerSHOW 2026 and the co-located Painting & Decorating Show. Here’s our take, and what you can use for your own stand at InstallerSHOW 2027.
The stands that won’t work are easy to spot
It doesn’t take long to spot the stands that aren’t going to deliver. They’re obvious before you even reach them. Products laid out on a tablecloth like a car boot sale. No backdrop, or the opposite, a wall of banners with so many words you’d have to stop and read an essay to work out what they actually do. Rows of near-identical products with nothing to tell you, at a glance, why you’d care.
Then there’s the staff. Heads down on their phones, more interested in the group chat than the people walking past. Or the other extreme, someone lunging at you like a tout outside a bar. And the stand with so many people stood on it doing nothing it looks like a Westlife line-up.
Most of that isn’t about budget. It’s about thought, and all of it is avoidable. The one exception is the big empty stand, and that’s a budget mistake Edward Marshall, our creative director, sees a lot: people blow 90% of the budget on space, leaving nothing to build a proper stand, and “the staff always look really awkward and exposed.”
What makes a stand work
Six different briefs, but the same handful of lessons come up year after year. Here’s what tends to separate a stand that works from one that just sits there
A stand that pulls people in and keeps them there beats a wall of product every time, as long as it gets you talking to the right people. The trick is holding someone’s attention without making them feel cornered.
“The longer someone spends on your stand without feeling like they’re being pushed into a sales pitch, the better the conversation becomes,” says Edward. “But you’ve got to give them something they haven’t already seen three times that day.”
Make the hook part of what you do
A game or a giveaway will pull a crowd, but not necessarily the crowd you want. The strongest hooks tie straight back to your product, so the people they attract are the people who might actually buy. Kathryn Baker, our project manager, puts it well:
“Attracting people for the novelty of your stand alone won’t guarantee you’re in front of potential buyers. Instead, pick something original that actually links back to work you do.”
Technical product? Sell the problem, not the spec
InstallerSHOW is full of technical exhibitors, and it’s tempting to get every feature onto the stand. Don’t. Lead with the problem you solve, and let the detail come up in conversation. We’ve written a whole guide on this for technical exhibitors if you want to go deeper.
Build it to use again
Because we design and engineer our stands ourselves, we build them to be reconfigured and reused rather than scrapped after one show. It’s better for budgets and a more sustainable approach, and it works best when the stand is planned around all the events you’ll attend from the start. As Edward points out, sustainability isn’t just a materials question anymore. It’s in how a stand is designed, built, transported, and who you partner with to do it.
Sort the boring stuff early
RAMS, health and safety paperwork, electrics, logistics. The parts nobody photographs are the parts that make a show calm or stressful. Get them handled early and your team can focus on the show itself, not the admin.
Is InstallerSHOW worth it?
InstallerSHOW 2027 is expecting 900+ exhibitors and 11 CPD-accredited content streams across plumbing, heating, renewables and electricals. So it’s busy, and it’s a serious investment. Is it worth it? Here’s David Hennessy, our managing director:
“Will it give you a good return on investment? If you’re in the HVAC, energy and built environment sectors, it’s a very economical and efficient way to chat to ideal customers and meet up with existing ones, to show products and services in person and talk face to face. I am pretty sure it would take a lot longer and a lot more money to get in front of potentially 40,000+ people. Plus, the CPD and learning you and the show visitors get is a valuable bonus and a huge draw.”
He’s blunt about commitment, too. “If you’re not going to do it properly, don’t bother doing it at all,” says David. “It’s not cheap to exhibit, so make the most of it.”
And you don’t need the biggest stand in the hall to make it pay:
“InstallerSHOW is showy. There’s a lot of money there. But don’t be put off. It’s not go big on space or go home. You can do amazing things with smaller exhibition stands. You can have a huge flash stand and a lacklustre sales team, or a smaller stand with a team who’ll happily chat and engage with people. The second one is a lot more powerful.”
Can’t wait for 2027? elementalLONDON is in November
InstallerSHOW 2027 is a year off, but you don’t have to wait that long. The same team runs elementalLONDON, on at ExCeL London this November alongside London Build. Many of the same brands and buyers attend, so it’s a good way to get in front of the industry sooner. David’s advice if you’re weighing it up:
If you want good stand advice, pick up the phone and talk to us. Ask us the questions and expect questions back. We’ll help you work out whether InstallerSHOW 2027 or elementalLONDON 2026 is right for you, whether there are other shows worth looking at, and how much you might be in for on a stand.”
What we did at InstallerSHOW 2026
So that’s the thinking. Here’s the work. Six stands across three halls at InstallerSHOW and the co-located Painting & Decorating Show. Fourteen crew, one very busy week, every stand designed, engineered and built in-house at our workshop in Cambridgeshire.
Danfoss
A hybrid exhibition stand built around a working podcast studio: a glazed booth with warm timber panelling, custom benches and headphone stations, so visitors could sit and listen to live sessions through the glass. Each session featured different industry experts, recorded live to be released as a series over the coming months.
Fleetwood Paints
A modular stand with custom elements to launch Fleetwood Paints into the UK market, built around giant replicas of their actual paint cans, scaled up and made in our Cambridgeshire workshop. They were giving away full-size samples, not little testers, so the biggest can was a tardis inside, holding enough stock to keep the team on the stand all day.
Alan T. Carr.
A sleek, luxury modular stand to launch Alan T. Carr’s rebrand to ATC, the new navy, pink and white palette running throughout. Basins, towel radiators and bathroom furniture were wall-mounted, with a shower and toilet on plinths and a freestanding bath at the front filled with branded giveaways. 3D-effect graphics added depth across the build. By mid-afternoon on day one, 500 branded rubber ducks had gone.
Roper Rhodes
A modular stand showing off Roper Rhodes’ bathroom products, including shower panels displaying their range. We also built a branded grab machine and a Top Gear-style leaderboard for who could change over a toilet seat the fastest, which was competitive, on brand and had a crowd around it all show. We even put some of their own freestanding display units, which had been sitting unused back at base, back to work. They captured hundreds of leads on day one.
EOGB
A modular stand with two brands on it, the main EOGB brand and their Sapphire sub-brand, kept clear without it feeling like two stands bolted together. Flat-pack furniture, fake grass and planting filled it out, with one large product on the edge and another lit up by LEDs in its own casing. Branded rigging overhead acted as a waymarker across the hall.
OSO Hotwater
A modular stand with central walling carrying different product lines on each face, and plinths with built-in lighting for OSO Hotwater’s tanks, which had cut-outs so people could see inside as well as out. Branded hanging rigging meant the stand could be seen from a distance. We designed it to be reconfigured for Data Center World (DCW) next year at a smaller size.
Motive Exhibitions, 3 Orion Court, Ambuscade Road, Colmworth Business Park, Eaton Socon, St. Neots, PE19 8YX
