Expo & Trade Show
Booths, pipe and drape, signage and convention equipment — installed and struck on the show’s clock, not yours.
A trade show is the one event where you do not control the schedule. The hall opens when it opens, your booth has to be finished before it does, and the loading dock is shared with two hundred other exhibitors. We work to that clock.
Expo & Trade Show Services
What Does An Exhibitor Actually Need To Rent?
Less than most people think, and different things than they expect.
The show usually sells you bare space. What arrives in it is yours to organise: pipe and drape to make walls, furniture to make it a room, signage so people can find you, and power for anything that switches on.
Read your exhibitor manual before you order anything. It sets height limits, sightline rules, what can be hung and what cannot, and which trades the hall requires you to use. Those rules decide half your order.
How Tight Is The Install Window?
Tighter than any other event we do.
Move-in is a fixed slot on a shared dock, often measured in hours, with a queue of exhibitors behind you. Miss it and you are installing around a live show floor, or not at all. Move-out is worse — everyone leaves at once.
This is the argument for one vendor. Four suppliers means four dock slots, four crews who have never met, and a dispute about who is late. One crew arrives with the whole booth on one truck and builds it in sequence.
Send us the exhibitor manual and your move-in time and we will build the schedule backwards from it.
Which Houston Shows Do You Work?
Houston runs a particular kind of show, and the industries here have particular expectations.
Energy and oil & gas conferences dominate the calendar — see oil & gas conferences. Medical and healthcare events run to their own standards for cleanliness and compliance. Dog shows need ring-side structure that nothing else does.
We also work the shows that are not in a hall at all: outdoor expos, vendor villages and industry days on a site with no walls and no power, which is a tenting job before it is a booth job.
What Goes Wrong, And What Prevents It?
Three things, and all of them are avoidable.
The booth breaks a rule nobody read. A banner hung above the height limit comes down on show morning. Check the manual first.
The power does not reach. Hall power lands where the hall decides, not where your demo is. That gap is cable, and cable across a walkway needs a ramp.
Nobody owns the problem. When the furniture is late and the drape is up, four vendors point at each other. One vendor cannot.
None of this is clever. It is just the difference between a booth that is ready and one that is nearly ready when the doors open.
Trade Show Success Starts With Planning
Send us your exhibitor manual, your booth number and your move-in slot. We will come back with a booth package, a schedule built backwards from the dock, and one person who owns it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Usually the show sells bare space and little else. Pipe and drape, furniture, signage, staging and power are typically yours to arrange. Your exhibitor manual is the authority – it lists what is included, what is prohibited, and which trades the hall requires. Read it before ordering.
As early as you have them, but the hard deadline is your move-in slot. Send us the exhibitor manual, your booth number and dimensions, and your move-in time. We build the schedule backwards from the dock.
Yes – both, which matters more than people expect. Move-out is when every exhibitor leaves at once and the dock becomes the bottleneck. Our crew installs and strikes, so you are not negotiating with the hall at midnight.
Yes. Outdoor expos, vendor villages and industry days are a tenting job before they are a booth job – no walls, no power, no floor. We supply all of it, which a booth-only contractor cannot.
That is the point of using us. Pipe and drape, furniture, signage, staging, lighting and power come off one truck with one crew and one contact. Four vendors means four dock slots and an argument about who was late.
Yes – dog shows, auto shows, sports expos and industry-specific conventions. Each has its own requirements, and the ring-side or demo-area structure is usually the part a standard booth contractor gets wrong.
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Plan your next event with ACME and let us worry about the details!
From corporate gatherings to a festival for thousands, ACME’s event specialists will walk you through the entire process.