The following article was originally published by Wide-format Impressions. To read more of their content, subscribe to their newsletter, Wide-Format Impressions.
Last year, Lindenmeyr Munroe had an open house that grew into its own miniature expo — this year, it figured, why not keep it going?
Over the course of two days (March 23-24), Lindenmeyr Munroe hosted its second annual wide-format expo with more than 30 exhibitors and 500+ attendees in its wide-format experience center in Trenton, New Jersey.
The two days were jam-packed with equipment demonstrations and informative presentations about the latest technologies and materials available in the wide-format world. One notable difference between this year’s event and last year's was the expansion of space.
“We used a lot more of our facility this year. We expanded into a third showroom, so now we’re over 15,000 sqft, and we have about a dozen more vendors here than we did last year,” said Keith Fischer, GM of wide-format for Lindenmeyr Munroe.
Amongst the expo’s 46 vendors were names like Epson, Canon, HP, Roland DG, and more.
One of the biggest draws of the show was the eurolaser wide-format textile cutting system 3XL-3200 with a processing area of 126.3x125.9", and it also comes equipped with a fully automatic conveyor belt. “We’re really excited about our new relationship with eurolaser, and being able to have a high-quality, high-speed textile cutting system here is really exciting,” Fischer said.
Fischer noted that last year was a learning experience, and that knowledge was then applied this year when it came to planning the expo. “We learned a lot last year, so this year we were a little more prepared, and attendance has almost doubled from what we were from last year, and we were able to start promoting it a lot sooner,” Fischer said. “We knew what we were starting with this year. We knew this year was definitely an expo, so we were able to plan and market it as such a little better this year than last year, we didn’t have to change course midway.”
Of course, planning any sort of large-scale event comes with its own share of challenges, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Fischer shared that there are a lot of moving parts, and it can be hard to sort of wrangle them all in. With planning an event of a greater scale, Fischer joked that he has a lot greater appreciation for trade shows like PRINTING United Expo with its convention services. He said managing convention services, as well as doing print demonstrations, is not an easy task.
Even though bigger events mean more time and planning, that won’t deter Fischer and his team from making this event bigger.
“I see this expo only growing from here. I just don’t know where it’s going to be,” Fischer laughed. “We were talking about next year maybe expanding into our warehouse.”