The planning that goes into creating a booth at a cycling show, festival, event or trade fair is incredible. At some of the big trade shows like Eurobike, the major players in the bike industry will invest vast amounts of time and money getting their booth “just right”. But what happens afterwards? Sadly, a lot of the booth materials end up in the recycling (or worse, in landfill). But what if there is a better way? We chat to tyre-meisters Schwalbe about their booth at this year’s Eurobike, which is anything but a one-hit-wonder.
The first thing you notice about Schwalbe’s booth at Eurobike 2024 is just how tall it is. Stretching from floor to ceiling, it towers over everything nearby. Your first impression might be that it looks a little like a building covered with a spider’s web of scaffolding and you wouldn’t be far wrong “The scaffolding is a symbol of reconstruction and of major change” Schwalbe PR Manager Steffen Yüngst told us. “The idea of building the stand from scaffolding came up in the course of our brand relaunch. Not everything is finished with a scaffold is erected - just like a brand relaunch is rolled out step by step” he continued.
Dotted discreetly all over their booth are printed fabric labels. Most people probably won’t give them a second glance, but if you do look at them, you notice they tell you a little about the provenance of the item they’re attached too. The reason that Schwalbe’s booth looks a little like building undergoing structural repairs is that it is actually constructed primarily from scaffolding, hired in from a local company and due to be returned to them (and subsequently hired out again to building sites all over Germany) in the days after the Eurobike expo closes.
This is the moniker ‘reduce, re-use and recycle’ put into practice and it fits perfectly with Schwalbe’s wider ethos of making their business as environmentally friendly (and socially responsible) as possible. Since they launched their first recycling scheme, based on butyl inner tubes, back in 2015, Schwalbe have recycled over 10 million old tubes, saving them for their normal destiny of being landfilled. The “devulcanisation” process for breaking down tubes to recover the butyl rubber was developed in the Schwalbe plant in Indonesia. They have so far rolled out the wide-scale collection and recycling of old inner tubes (via participating Schwalbe dealers) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Benelux countries, France, Italy, the UK and the USA. Last year, the company grew the recycling scheme to also include tyres, a world first for a bicycle tyre manufacturer and although this is currently limited to Germany, they have plans to grow the scheme to more destinations over time.
“It was always important to us at previous trade fair booths to use the maximum possible proportion of reusable parts. We have never thrown away much after a trade fair.” Steffen told us. Despite the fact their booth looked relatively simple, it still needed an impressive amount of time to put together “Just the scaffolding took a couple of days to put up and the whole booth take us nearly six days in total” he continued.
The Schwalbe booth showed some clever design touches, as well as being low impact and easy to re-use afterwards. Their booth showcased a “We get there” motto and Steffen explained that the ethos for the design was to "focus on our Schwalbe spirit, our strong relationships with our partners and the services and solutions we offer to our customers. Our booth was designed to showcase these new tools in the best possible way, embodying the spirit of achieving goals together."
Entering their booth, it was immediately obvious that Schwalbe put a lot of emphasis on the importance of their staff – on the wall behind the main reception desk are larger-than-life portraits of some of the company’s employees, all looking happy and contented. While some of the credit for this is down to the skill of the photographer, it does seem to match the ‘feel’ of the atmosphere inside the booth.
Image courtesy of @Schwalbe
A booth at a trade show needs to fulfil a huge number of criteria – showcasing the company’s products, representing the brand image, attracting visitors, facilitating meetings, creating a space for social gatherings and being a billboard to the world. Schwalbe’s booth manages to fulfil all these functions, but done in a way which is environmentally and socially responsible too. Kudos to them and hopefully they will inspire many other companies to try something similar in the future too.