What to pack for a trade show booth

A trade show booth has one real job: get someone to stop walking. Merch plays two very different roles in that, and mixing them up is the most common planning mistake we see. There's merch that pulls people in, and merch that goes home with them. Treat those as two tiers with two separate budgets.

Tier one: what draws people to the booth

This is the visible, wearable layer, your own team in matching kit that reads clearly from across a hall, plus a small amount of prize-tier product for booth games or raffles. It needs to look sharp under trade show lighting and photograph well, since a good portion of its job is showing up in other people's photos.

Tier two: what goes home in a bag

This is volume merch, handed out at the table or dropped into a tote at the door. It needs to be quick to produce in quantity, easy to ship and light enough that someone will actually carry it around a convention centre for the rest of the day. A tote bag solves its own transport problem here: give attendees a bag and everything else you hand them travels home in it too.

Work backwards from your event date

Trade show dates don't move, which makes them the least forgiving deadline in merch production. Once artwork and sizing are locked, production typically runs 6 to 10 weeks depending on the pieces involved. Lock your booth staff kit first, since it needs sizing per person, then plan the volume giveaway separately, since it only needs a size or two and can be finalised later.

What we'd skip

• Fragile giveaways. Anything that won't survive a backpack for three days at a convention isn't worth producing.
• A single item trying to do both jobs. Booth-staff kit and mass giveaway have different specs; forcing one product to cover both usually undershoots on both.
• Ordering exact headcount with no buffer. Booth staff kit should always have a small size buffer for last-minute team changes.