Stall fabrication at Mall Atriums, Navi Mumbai

Exhibiting at Mall Atriums, Navi Mumbai

Shopping-mall atriums and concourses for activations, pop-ups and kiosks. Everything from the first 3D concept to clearing the stand after dismantle is handled by one team and one project manager.

Two stands of identical size can need completely different engineering depending on the room they go into. Height limits, rigging availability, fixing restrictions, power allocation and build hours all change with the venue, and all of them are settled in writing before fabrication starts.

Of the 13 Navi Mumbai venues we cover, this one occupies the retail end of it — the largest and least self-selected audience, inside the strictest rulebook. Exhibitors tend to compare venues on footfall and cost; builders compare them on access, fixing and power, and on that measure the gap between the extremes of the Navi Mumbai list is very wide.

As a Tier 1 exhibition city, Navi Mumbai carries 2 named venues as well as 11 venue categories, which is why two shows in the same week can need entirely different builds. The practical consequence of that density is congestion at build-up: shared bays, lift queues and a hard clearance deadline that nobody moves.

Building in a mall atrium

A mall atrium buys you footfall that never had to register for a show, in exchange for the tightest rulebook of any venue type. Mall management controls build hours, noise, fire clearance, the marked footprint and the sightlines to every shopfront around you, and the structure normally has to go up and come down overnight so that the mall opens on time.

Mall atriums vary from one address to the next even inside Navi Mumbai, so the figures below are the pattern rather than the contract. The organiser's pack for your show is what we actually design to.

What to ask the organiser about mall atriums

Send the organiser this list before you commission anything. Each answer removes a contingency from the quote, and at mall atriums two or three of them change the structure rather than the finish.

Who exhibits at Navi Mumbai venues, and what that changes

Automobile, engineering, pharma, textiles and real estate account for most of the exhibiting activity in Navi Mumbai, and the sector is a bigger design input than the brand is. A pharma visitor and a textiles visitor will judge the same 18 sq.m by completely different criteria, so we brief against the sector first and the identity second.

Where a Navi Mumbai show draws from several of those sectors at once, the stand has to serve two briefs in one footprint. Zoning does it — pharma on the open frontage where it needs to be seen, textiles in the pocket behind where it needs to be discussed — and the space plan below is where that gets decided.

Stall sizes and lead times for Mall Atriums, Navi Mumbai

Most stands at a venue like this fall between 9 and 72 sq.m. The table below uses the same formula as our stall planner — storage at 10% of area up to 18 sq.m and 15% above, a meeting corner at 5% unless you are hosting meetings, display taking the remainder — so you can sanity-check a quote against the space you have actually booked.

Read the display column rather than the size column. A 36 sq.m stand carries about 28.8 sq.m of usable display once storage and a meeting corner are taken out, which is the number that decides how much product and how many people the stand can actually hold.

Designing a stand that works at Mall Atriums, Navi Mumbai

Atrium footfall never registered for a show, so the stand has to earn attention from people on their way somewhere else. One readable line, one thing visibly happening, and nothing that looks like a form to fill in.

The most common mistake here is treating every wall as equally valuable. One face does most of the work; identify it from the stand plan, spend the budget on it, and treat the rest as support.

Exhibitors here come largely from automobile, engineering and pharma, and an automobile audience has specific expectations: product visible, specification available, and somewhere to talk without shouting. We design for that rather than applying a generic layout.

What else is in Navi Mumbai

Navi Mumbai gives you more than one kind of room. Alongside this page we cover 2 named exhibition venues in the city — CIDCO Exhibition Centre, Vashi and Navi Mumbai Exhibition Grounds. Read by what each one calls itself, that list comprises 1 purpose-built exhibition or trade centre and 1 open ground or maidan: 2 different build specifications inside one city.

We also cover 11 venue categories in Navi Mumbai — stadium & sports complexes, corporate campus event spaces, industrial estate expo grounds, government exhibition grounds, resort & lawn venues, 5-star hotel ballrooms, convention & banquet halls, open exhibition grounds, mall atriums, university & college campuses and industry association halls — because most Indian shows outside the top handful of cities happen in a room that was built for something else. Each of those categories has its own access, fixing and power pattern, and each gets its own page.

Exhibiting elsewhere in Maharashtra

Maharashtra is not a one-city exhibition market. We cover 10 cities in the state — Navi Mumbai, Mumbai, Pune, Thane, Nagpur and Nashik, plus 4 more — with the same workshops, crews and project managers, so a programme that runs across several of them runs on one schedule rather than several.

Because we cover mall atriums in all 10 Maharashtra cities on our list, a stand designed for this venue type is designed for the state. The structure, the fixing method and the power assumptions carry over; only the footprint and the graphics change.

A multi-city programme is mostly a logistics question rather than a design one. One approved drawing set, one set of reusable panels, graphics printed per city and a crew that travels with the stand — that is the whole model, and it is what keeps the per-city cost falling as the programme goes on.