By the Exhibition Stall Design editorial team · Updated 1 October 2026 · 9 min read
Short answer
AV & LED wall support works in ten stages, and only four of them need you: you give the brief, you send consolidated feedback, you approve in writing, and you supply print-ready files. Everything else — concept, drawings, the organiser approval pack, production, quality control, freight, installation, show cover and dismantle — sits with the supplier. A 36 sq.m standard-finish build is 4 weeks from first call to doors, with the workshop owning 11 of the 28 days.
Key takeaways
- Lead time is 3 weeks for a stall under 24 sq.m, 4 weeks from 24 sq.m and 5 weeks from 54 sq.m, plus 2 weeks for a premium finish and 2 more for a double-decker.
- Your approval is on the drawing set and the materials schedule, not on the render. The render is the sales tool; the drawing is what anyone can be held to.
- Consolidate every stakeholder's comments into one reply per round. Serial feedback from five people is the commonest cause of a compressed build.
- A day lost before design freeze is a day you can still spend. A day lost after it comes out of finishing, quality control or build-up.
- Dismantle is part of the job, not an afterthought. Clearing the stand inside the organiser's window is what protects your deposit.
- Ask for a written storage inventory after the show. It is the document that makes the second edition cost a fraction of the first.
From enquiry to empty hall: the whole sequence
LED video walls, displays, sound systems and technicians for stalls, stages and conferences.
The design is the visible part and rarely the difficult one. What actually decides whether a participation goes smoothly is a chain of handovers — you to the supplier, the supplier to the organiser, the organiser back, the workshop to the venue — where every link has a deadline and a slip anywhere shows up at the far end. Event managers, corporate communication teams and agencies running conferences, launches, dealer meets and public shows benefit most from seeing that chain written down before they commit to anything.
The table below is the whole project on one screen. Read the third column first, because that is your part, and almost everything in the second column is downstream of something in the third. Timings are for a 36 sq.m standard-finish job, which the planner puts at 4 weeks — scale them up for a larger or premium build and down for a small system stall.
| Stage | What we do | What you do | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Brief | Ask the standard questions, then return the answers as a scope document you can correct | Answer eight questions and attach two or three reference images | Day 0 |
| 2. Concept | Draw the plan and show you the stand at eye level from the main aisle | Review it — and bring the people who will have opinions later | 2 days |
| 3. Revisions | Two rounds of changes across layout, graphics, finishes and lighting | Collect every stakeholder's comments and send them as one reply per round | 4 days |
| 4. Design freeze and quote | Freeze the drawing set, issue the materials schedule and an itemised quote | Check the quote against the drawings, approve in writing, raise the order | 2 days |
| 5. Organiser submission | File the full approval pack with the organiser against the manual's deadlines | Share the allotment letter, the exhibitor manual and any portal login | 3 days |
| 6. Production | Build, finish and print, with every material and print order raised on day one | Send final files at the start of the window, not the end | 11 days |
| 7. Pre-assembly and dispatch | Trial-fit graphics, run the electricals, pack spares and book the inward slot | Give us a name and number at the venue, and a plan for your products | 2 days, then 2 in transit |
| 8. Build-up and handover | Install to drawing, test power and lighting, clean, then walk you through the stand | Attend the handover, and keep someone contactable during build-up hours | 2 days |
| 9. Show days | Supervisor on call for running repairs, lamp changes, graphics touch-ups and consumables | Work the plan, and report problems in the morning rather than at closing time | Show duration |
| 10. Dismantle | Strike, clear the site on time, and send you a written storage inventory | Clear your stock and equipment, and confirm who receives the inventory | Same night, usually |
Durations are critical-path days for 36 sq.m at standard finish, and they come from the same formula as the stall planner — 3 weeks base, one more week from 24 sq.m, two more from 54 sq.m, two for a premium finish, two for a second storey. Show days and dismantle sit after doors open and are not part of the lead time.
The schedule is soft at the front and concrete at the back. Spend your delays early, where they are free.
The ten stages, from your side of the table
Here is what each stage feels like from your side of the table, including the questions you will be asked and the ones worth asking back. The order matters more than the duration: every stage below is gated on the one before it being finished, not started.
Read the last line of each stage. That is the part nobody explains at enquiry stage, and it is what decides whether your stand is finished at 9 a.m. on show morning or still being painted at midnight.
01
1. The brief — a short call that decides everything after it
First contact is a conversation, not a form. The questions are always the same — which show, which city, which dates, how many square metres, how many sides open, what the height limit is, roughly what you intend to spend, and what a successful visit looks like — and the answers come back to you in writing before anything is drawn. Treat the gaps honestly: an unanswered question costs a sentence, an invented answer costs a redesign. Delay at this point is the only delay in the whole sequence that costs you nothing at all.
02
2. The concept — a layout and a visual, not a price
The first pass lands in about 2 days and it is deliberately about arrangement rather than appearance. Read the plan before you read the render: a visitor should be able to step in without committing to a conversation, see the thing they came for immediately, and reach a person without being intercepted — and your own team needs somewhere to put coats, cartons and laptops. Everything here is still free to change. What you will not get yet is a firm figure, because quoting before the scope is settled is how both sides end up disappointed.
03
3. Revisions — consolidate, then send once
The number of revision rounds matters far less than how the comments arrive. Five stakeholders commenting in sequence will generate three rounds out of two, because each one reacts to a drawing the last one changed. One owner, one consolidated reply per round, and a decision about which conflicting comment wins before it reaches us — that is the whole technique. Say what is wrong, not what you would prefer; a sightline blocked by a counter can be fixed, an instruction to be more premium cannot. 4 days is the allowance.
04
4. Freeze, quote, purchase order
The design is frozen into a dimensioned drawing set, a materials and finish schedule, and an itemised quote. Insist on the itemisation: transport, installation, dismantle, electrical fittings and taxes are the five lines most often left out of a lump sum, and together they are not small. Check the quote against the drawing rather than against the render, then confirm in writing. Your purchase order releases the job to production and books the crew — without it neither the material prices nor the build-up slot is held for you. Be late at freeze and the organiser submission is late too, and that deadline is not negotiable.
05
5. The exhibitor manual, and the deadlines inside it
Every show publishes an exhibitor manual containing a rulebook and a set of submission deadlines: stand drawings, dimensions and height, structural calculations for anything raised or hanging, electrical load, fire-retardancy certificates for the materials, and for a two-storey build a structural engineer's sign-off. We prepare and file all of it. What we need from you is the allotment letter, the manual itself and any organiser portal login. The risk being managed here is no rehearsal or technical run before doors open. Submit late and approval can land during build-up, which means building something simpler than you approved.
06
6. Production — the point of no return on changes
Approved drawings become a cutting list, a print schedule and an order for every bought-in element, all raised on the same day, because a single late delivery is what turns a comfortable build into a night shift. 11 days is realistic for a 36 sq.m build at standard finish. This is where changes stop being free: a layout change means re-cutting panels that are already finished, and a graphic change means reprinting. What we need from you is print-ready artwork and final content at the start of this window rather than the end, because printing runs last and graphics are the most visible thing on the stand.
07
7. Pre-assembly, quality check and dispatch
Nothing ships untested. The whole thing is assembled in the workshop first, which is why our crews spend build-up assembling a known object instead of discovering one: panels come numbered, graphics have already been trial-fitted, every circuit has been run under load and every lamp aimed. The parts that get damaged in transit travel in duplicate. Freight is then booked into the organiser's inward window, which is often a slot rather than a day, and 2 days in transit is a realistic allowance once a show week has every truck in the city heading for the same gate.
08
8. Handover — ten minutes that are worth an hour of phone calls
Build-up is shared with every other exhibitor in the hall and their forklifts, so it is a question of sequence rather than effort: floor, structure, graphics, electricals, AV, furniture, clean. Lighting is aimed at the product rather than at the floor, circuits are tested under load, and anything with a cue is run end to end before anyone goes home. The handover is a walkthrough on the stand, not a note — and it is the moment to say "that counter is on the wrong side" while a crew is still in the building and the tools are still out.
09
9. Show days — running repairs and early warnings
Once doors open the job changes from building to maintaining. Lamps fail, laminate gets scuffed by trolleys, a counter turns out to be on the wrong side of the queue, and hall power occasionally trips. A supervisor is reachable for all of it, and the only thing we ask is that problems are reported in the morning rather than at six in the evening. Everything else that happens now is yours. A stand produces footfall and conversations; it cannot qualify a buyer, take a brief or book a follow-up, and those are the things the participation is actually judged on.
10
10. Strike, clearance and the storage inventory
The last stage is the one nobody plans and everybody pays for. Clearance happens inside a window the organiser sets and charges against, which means the strike sequence is decided in advance rather than improvised at closing time. Take your products, samples and valuables off the stand first. Then ask for a written list of what has gone into storage, in what condition, and what it can be reconfigured into — without that document, reusable assets become untraceable within two shows and you quietly buy them again next year.
Your four jobs, and the paperwork behind them
The list below looks administrative and is actually the schedule. Every delay at the front of an exhibition project traces back to one of these items sitting in somebody's inbox, because each of them belongs to a different part of your organisation. Gather them before the first call rather than during the first fortnight.
For AV & LED wall support specifically, the items below are what a supplier genuinely cannot work without. Everything else can be decided later, and much of it is better decided later, once there is a drawing to react to.
- The venue or hall plan with available power load and rigging points marked
- Audience size and the seating or circulation arrangement you intend to use
- The organiser's limits on sound level, rigging, working hours and curfew
- The presenter or demo lead, available for one technical rehearsal before doors
- The run order, and who is authorised to call changes on the day
- Any permissions the venue or local authority requires, and who is applying for them
| What you supply | Due by | What stalls without it |
|---|---|---|
| Event, city, dates, area, open sides and height limit | The brief | Everything. These are the numbers the design is a solution to |
| Your goal, in one sentence with a number in it | The brief | The plan optimises for looking finished rather than for working |
| Budget band | The brief | You get a concept that cannot be built for the money, and lose a week |
| Consolidated feedback | Each revision round | Each round answers the previous commenter instead of the design |
| Written approval and purchase order | Design freeze | Nothing is reserved — not the materials, not the slot, not the crew |
| Final content, video and presentation files | Start of production | There is no time to bench-test the system as a whole before dispatch |
| Height, rigging and material restrictions from the manual | Before design freeze | A compliant design becomes a non-compliant one at submission |
| Site contact and delivery slot | Dispatch | The truck waits at the gate and loses its build-up slot |
| A reachable decision-maker during build-up | Build-up | Every judgement call defaults to the drawing, which is usually right and occasionally not |
| Products, stock and samples on site | Handover | The stand is finished but empty when doors open |
Each row is a dependency, not a preference. The due-by column is the one to diarise, because every item on it gates something that cannot start early.
What you are actually signing off
There is a difference between what you like and what you have agreed, and it is worth being pedantic about for one afternoon. The visual communicates intent. The dimensioned drawings, the materials schedule, the lighting layout and the load calculation are the documents that get cut, painted, printed, wired and inspected — and they are the ones to read line by line.
Read the materials schedule in particular. "Laminate finish" and a named laminate code are not the same commitment, and the difference between them is exactly the gap between the render and the stand that most complaints are about.
- The rigging and power plan, which the venue has to accept before load-in
- The content list, with durations, aspect ratios and the order they play in
- The run-of-show, including who calls each cue and when the rehearsal happens
- The redundancy plan — what carries a spare and what does not
- The strike schedule, because clearing the rig is charged if it overruns
The calendar, broken down honestly
Exhibitors tend to picture the lead time as mostly building. It is not. On a 36 sq.m standard-finish job the workshop owns 11 of 28 days; the rest is decisions, drawings, approvals, freight and installation. That matters because the 8 days at the front are the only genuinely elastic days in the schedule — and they are the days most exhibitors spend without noticing.
Read the list as sequential days on the critical path. It totals 28, which is 4 weeks, matching the planner's figure for this size. Where a show's deadlines permit it, approvals run in parallel with production, and that parallel running is the only contingency in the plan. It is also the first thing a late approval consumes.
| First call, written scope, and the opening layout | ₹2 days |
|---|---|
| Two rounds of consolidated changes | ₹4 days |
| Design freeze, materials schedule and itemised quote | ₹2 days |
| Approval pack filed with the organiser and cleared | ₹3 days |
| Cutting, assembly, finishing, curing and print | ₹11 days |
| Dry build, load test, numbering and load-out | ₹2 days |
| Transport to the venue | ₹2 days |
| Build-up, testing, cleaning and handover | ₹2 days |
| Total days on the critical path, brief to doors | ₹28 days |
28 days is 4 weeks, which is the planner's figure for 36 sq.m: 3 weeks base plus 1 from 24 sq.m. Add 2 weeks for a premium finish and 2 for a double-decker, and allow longer again if the show is in another city or the organiser's submission deadline falls early.
Exhibiting soon? Let's build your stall.
The arithmetic of the space you booked
Before anyone draws anything, it is worth asking whether the space can do the job at all. The planner's split is fixed: 10% storage up to 18 sq.m, 15% above it, 5% for a meeting corner — 20% when meetings are a real goal rather than a nice idea — and the remainder for display.
Divide the display area by 2.5 and you get roughly how many visitors fit at once. Divide total area by 9 for the staff count. At 36 sq.m that is 28.8 sq.m of display, about 11 visitors at a time and 4 people on duty. If your footfall expectation is larger than that, the constraint is the stall rather than the design or the marketing — and the time to discover it is at concept stage, when the fix is still free.
| Stall size | Display area | Storage | Staff on duty | Visitors at once | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 sq.m | 10.2 sq.m | 1.2 sq.m | 2 | 4 | 3 weeks |
| 18 sq.m | 15.3 sq.m | 1.8 sq.m | 2 | 6 | 3 weeks |
| 24 sq.m | 19.2 sq.m | 3.6 sq.m | 3 | 7 | 4 weeks |
| 54 sq.m | 43.2 sq.m | 8.1 sq.m | 6 | 17 | 5 weeks |
| 72 sq.m | 57.6 sq.m | 10.8 sq.m | 8 | 23 | 5 weeks |
| 100 sq.m | 80 sq.m | 15 sq.m | 12 | 32 | 5 weeks |
These are the planner's own figures, not estimates: storage by ratio, staff at one per 9 sq.m with a floor of two, visitors at one per 2.5 sq.m of display. The lead-time column is before any premium-finish or second-storey addition.
Lateness, honestly: where it hurts and where it does not
Being late is normal. Nearly every project loses a few days somewhere, and a good schedule is one that can absorb them. What decides the outcome is where the days are lost, because the schedule is not uniformly elastic — the front is soft and the back is concrete.
What follows is the conversation suppliers usually have internally rather than with the client. Knowing it in advance turns a panic into a trade-off, which is the difference between paying for a night shift and opening with something simpler than you approved.
| What slips | What it pushes | What you can still save |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback on the concept | Every stage after it, day for day | Cut to one revision round and freeze earlier |
| Internal agreement between stakeholders | The revision rounds | Give one person the final word in writing |
| Design freeze and purchase order | Organiser submission and material ordering | Freeze the structure, keep graphics open for two more days |
| Organiser submission | Approval, which has a published deadline | Submit a simpler, compliant version and build to that |
| Print-ready artwork | Printing, which runs last in production | Reduce the panel count and apply the rest as vinyl on site |
| The freight slot | Build-up, which starts without the stand in the hall | Split the load so the structure arrives first |
| Your own staff briefing | Nothing physical — but the result | Run it in the hotel the night before; thirty minutes is enough |
| Clearing the stand at dismantle | The organiser's window, which is charged | Accept the charge and keep the crew working through it |
The options narrow fast. A delay flagged the day it happens usually has three answers; the same delay flagged a week later usually has one.
A day lost before design freeze is a day you can still spend. A day lost after it comes out of finishing, quality control or build-up.
The three failures worth designing around
What derails projects is rarely the design. Under-specified equipment that looks dull in a bright hall heads the list, and it is invisible until build-up. Ask the unglamorous questions early: which trades are in-house, which are bought in, and who is accountable when a bought-in element arrives wrong.
The second is scope that was never written down. If the quote does not name the finish, the lighting count, the flooring type and who clears the stand afterwards, two suppliers are not quoting the same job and the cheaper number is simply the one with more left out.
The third failure is ownership. Ten stages with four different parties involved and no single person watching the handovers is how a 4-week schedule ends up compressed into a weekend. The remedy is contractual, not personal: a named project manager and a dated schedule, agreed before the order rather than after it.
- Under-specified equipment that looks dull in a bright hall
- No rehearsal or technical run before doors open
- Content not built for the actual screen or surface size
- Missing backup power or spare units
Getting a concept and a price
To begin, we need the show and city, the build-up and show dates, your area and open sides, and two or three images with a line on what you liked about each. From that comes a concept and a line-by-line quote, usually within 48 hours, plus a frank view on whether the remaining time is enough.
Rental by day; bundled with stall builds. Design is included with any confirmed fabrication order, production happens in our own workshops, the organiser paperwork is ours to prepare and file, and one named project manager stays with the job from brief to clearance.
- Touchscreens and kiosks
- PA systems and mics
- On-site AV technicians
- Indoor P2.5–P3.9 LED walls
Frequently asked questions
How long does an AV & LED wall support project take from brief to handover?+
3 weeks for a stall under 24 sq.m, 4 weeks from 24 sq.m and 5 weeks from 54 sq.m. Add 2 weeks for a premium finish and 2 more for a double-decker. For a 36 sq.m standard build that is 4 weeks, or 28 calendar days, of which the workshop owns 11.
What exactly do I need to provide?+
Four things at the brief, and three later: the space and the dates, your goal with a number attached, brand files you own the rights to, and a budget range — then the organiser's manual at freeze, print-ready artwork at the start of production, and a reachable decision-maker during build-up. None of it is difficult. It is simply spread across several people in your own organisation.
What am I signing off on, the render or the drawing?+
The drawing set and the materials schedule. The render shows intent; the dimensioned drawings and the named laminate, paint and graphic substrate codes are what the workshop builds from and what anyone can be held to. Approve both on the same day.
How many revision rounds are included?+
Two, which is almost always enough when the comments arrive together. Nominate one person to consolidate every stakeholder's feedback into a single reply per round — serial feedback from five people is the most common reason a third round becomes necessary.
What happens if I am late approving the design?+
The schedule is soft at the front and concrete at the back, so a delay at freeze is paid for later at a worse rate. The usual rescue is to release the structure to the workshop immediately and hold only the graphic decisions open — which works once, and costs you the parallel-running buffer between approvals and production.
Who handles the organiser drawings and approvals?+
Your supplier should, and it should be in the scope rather than an extra. The pack is drawings, overall dimensions and height, load calculations for anything raised or suspended, the electrical load, and certification that the panel materials are fire-retardant. Send the exhibitor manual across with the brief, because its rules decide what can be drawn at all.
Can you work to a shorter timeline than this?+
Sometimes, and always by trading something explicit. The four levers are fewer revision rounds, a simpler structure, finishes with no curing time, and paid out-of-hours labour at the venue. What cannot be done is compressing the workshop, the organiser's approval or the build-up window, so a date that depends on any of those is a date that will move.
Do I need to be at the venue during build-up?+
Not for the whole window, but be reachable and attend the handover. Ten minutes standing on the stand is worth an hour of phone calls, and it is the moment to move a counter while a crew is still in the hall with its tools out.
What goes wrong most often, and whose fault is it?+
Three things, in order of cost. A lump-sum quote, so two suppliers were never pricing the same job. Feedback arriving one person at a time, so two revision rounds became four and production started late. And under-specified equipment that looks dull in a bright hall, which is settled by asking where the work physically happens rather than by negotiating harder.
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