Branding and Bonding on the Floor

Rhiannon Andersen is Co-Owner and CMO at Steelhead Productions, a company that designs exhibits and tradeshow environments, customizes displays to the clients' specifications, rents out the components, and oversees shipping, setup, onsite union labor workers, and teardown.

Many companies sell complete exhibits or tradeshow environments. Steelhead Productions has been in the "rental business" since Rhiannon's father started the company 22 years ago near Seattle. Rhiannon and her business partner, Sean, bought the company in 2006. In 2007, they decided to move to Las Vegas, thinking that, although they were doing well in Seattle, opportunity would be much greater in convention-rich Vegas. They arrived just in time for the economy to take a dive.

Riding out the 2008 through 2010 economic downturn by providing a lower-cost "rent vs. own" option for cash-strapped exhibitors, Rhiannon believes today's "collaborative consumption" (e.g., Airbnb, Uber) is transforming how people have access to they want and is "right in line" with Steelhead's rental philosophy.

Steelhead buys infrastructure components and maintains its massive inventory (and some of its high-end clients' properties) in a 50,000 square foot warehouse near the Las Vegas convention center. The company provides flooring, infrastructure components, backdrops, furniture, specialty lighting, video screens, monitors and more—everything tradeshow and event managers need for temporary, impactful, and sustainable branding. Each display is customized to meet the renting client's requirements. Rental exhibits have another advantage in addition to lower cost and curated setup—flexibility. Because companies don't buy high-cost displays, they can easily update and refresh their "image" with every show.

Due to high fuel costs, the cost of crating tradeshow infrastructure and shipping it long distance can be prohibitive. Rhiannon recommends that exhibitors or tradeshow marketers develop relationships with exhibit rental companies like Steelhead near where they are exhibiting.

Rhiannon has found her company's membership in Entrepreneur's Organization and exposure to other entrepreneurs has brought an increased understanding of smart ways of being a business owner.

She feels that the future of the tradeshow industry does not rest on techno-glitter as much as on the human-to-human connection and bonding that can happen on the tradeshow floor.

Rhiannon can be reached on her company website at exhibithappy.com, which resolves to: https://www.steelheadproductions.com/. On LinkedIn, the company shares thoughts on industry trends. Instagram and Facebook speak more to how the organization works.