Taking Our Own Approach to the Show Floor

For years, we’ve designed exhibition stands for other people. At SBC Summit Lisbon, we finally became our own client.

No brief landed in our inbox. No brand team to present to. No one to tell us the idea might be a little ambitious. So naturally, we built a fully functioning nail bar in 2 weeks.

Why a nail bar?

SBC Summit is loud, vibrant and unapologetically busy. It’s one of the biggest dates in the iGaming calendar and, for a few days, Lisbon becomes home to a lot of brands trying very hard to get your attention.

We wanted to do the opposite.

The idea came from one of our founders: create somewhere people could sit down, switch off for a moment and leave feeling a little better than when they arrived. But we had just a matter of weeks to turn that conversation into an actual, functioning nail bar on an exhibition floor in Lisbon.

The Concept.

We spend our working lives asking clients what they want people to feel when they enter their space, what they want to be remembered for and what we can do that hasn't already been done ten stands down.

This time, we had to answer those questions ourselves.

And the answer kept coming back to the same thing: we wanted people to feel looked after.

Because, underneath all the visuals, finishes, production schedules and build days, that’s a huge part of what we actually do.

Our clients trust us with a lot. Budgets, deadlines, launches, ambitious ideas and occasionally something they've dreamed up that we're not entirely sure how we're going to build yet. Our job is to take care of it all. We treat every project as a bespoke treatment, you want to try something new, or revamp something that feels like it needs more, and we are there through every element.

The TCC Nail Bar gave us a way of showing that rather than saying it.

The Space

The space needed to feel unmistakably ours. Not overly branded. Not corporate.

We designed a warm, contemporary space, complete with treatment stations, a carefully considered material palette and hospitality throughout every appointment.

And before we knew it the doors were open. The aisles were buzzing with footfall, and we started to see the reactions form. Within the context of an iGaming exhibition, our booth felt unexpected - which was exactly the point.

People stopped in their tracks to work out what was going on, snap a picture and lean in to find out what we were offering. Then they came in. Then they booked.

Day one was fully booked within a few hours, and the TCC Nail Bar was in high demand throughout the entire show. There were manicures, laughs, conversations, drinks, introductions and… plenty of men getting their nails done too! We all have nails!

For something that had existed only as an idea a few weeks earlier, seeing every chair occupied was a pretty good moment.

The Experience

There’s a tendency in exhibition stand design to separate the stand from what happens inside it. And at TCC we don't see it that way.

The architecture can be brilliant, but what someone actually does in your space - and how they feel while they're there - is what turns a booth into an experience. An experience into a memory.

For the Nail Bar, the activation wasn't added to the design afterwards. It was the design.

The layout existed because of the treatments. The hospitality worked around the appointments. The aesthetic set the mood. Even the pace of the experience was deliberately different from what was happening a few metres away on the show floor.

Everything had a reason for being there.

That’s an approach we bring to our client work too, “Every project gets its own treatment. A new idea, a fresh take on something existing, or a complete rethink – we shape the approach around what you need.”
 whether we're designing an iGaming exhibition stand, developing a new activation or managing a multi-show international programme.

Start with what you want people to experience. Then build around that core.

The Outcome

Apparently, we make life quite difficult for ourselves. We aim for perfection, and in a condensed time frame that takes a lot of dedication.

In a matter of weeks, our team took a slightly unexpected idea and turned it into a fully operational brand experience at one of the biggest iGaming events in Europe.

And people got it. They stopped. They stayed. They talked about it. They even came back with colleagues.

For our first time being our own client, we'll take that.

Now the question is what we do next…

If your next exhibition brief could do with an idea that people don't see coming, we'd like to hear it, discuss it, and make it happen!