Quick-Step recently won the “Best Large Booth” award during Surfaces 2013. This prestigious award is given to only one exhibiting company each year in recognition of achieving a superior presence at the show. Surfaces is widely known as the largest and most important annual gathering of all players in the flooring industry.
“Surfaces is THE meeting place for our industry, so Quick-Step always puts a tremendous amount of effort into successfully using this venue as the launching pad for all of the fresh new products, messaging, and sales tools we bring to our customers each year,” said Paij Thorn-Brooks, senior director of marketing for Unilin, Quick-Step’s parent company. “We generated a lot of excitement at the show this year. Visitors told us that they could definitely feel the enthusiasm in our Quick-Step booth.”
Booth Theme: “Long Live Style”
“In this year’s Surfaces booth, we launched our new ‘Long Live Style’ selling message,” said Thorn-Brooks. “The ‘Long Live Style’ mantra nicely illustrates how Quick-Step’s fashion-driven product line offers the richest, most sophisticated premium looks available in tandem with extreme durability and low maintenance.”
Launched at Surfaces, the new “Long Live Style” theme is also woven throughout all aspects of Quick-Step’s 2013 merchandising: POP, product displays, web, catalogs, printed take-with pieces, retail events, social media, advertising, and media relations. One of the keys to Quick-Step’s continued success in the marketplace is that the brand takes a superior product line and wraps it in a comprehensive merchandising program, equipping its retailers for success with Quick-Step product. Quick-Step’s Surfaces presence is just one aspect of the brand’s comprehensive merchandising program.
Booth Design
“We designed our booth to hit a homerun on several fronts and definitely feel that we achieved our goal,” said Thorn-Brooks. “In addition to serving as an exciting, social meeting place on the show floor for our customers, our booth was designed to engagingly present our “Long Live Style” selling story as well as effectively showcase our new products. After visiting the Quick-Step booth, distributors and retailers told us that they left the show equipped to engage in conversations with their own customers regarding the new Quick-Step 2013 products and selling story.”
Creative Imagery, Innovative Technology, & Impressive Visuals
Visitors entered the Quick-Step booth through archways topped by either a 10-foot spilling glass of red wine or a 10-foot red high heel shoe. This was the first clue that woven throughout the booth was creative imagery coupled with clever catch-phrases, serving as double-entendres to engagingly illustrate that Quick-Step products offer both “high style” and “high performance”.
Once inside the booth, customers found innovative new products, beautiful vignettes, inspiring photography, clever messaging, videos, demos, majestic product towers, new merchandising, displays, augmented reality technology, and the presence of Quick-Step’s celebrity designer.
Adding to the excitement of the booth was the new “augmented reality” technology that Quick-Step is launching into its in-store displays this year. Augmented reality (AR) is an innovative fusion between real world visuals and virtual reality. The addition of AR to Quick-Step displays is visually fascinating for customers and also engages them to personally interact with the display. Adding this technology to the in-store Quick-Step displays provides the retail customer with a creative and interactive personal experience where still images come to life, effectively educating the customer on the performance features of Quick-Step floors.
“All elements worked together in this year’s “Long Live Style” booth to illustrate how Quick-Step makes it easy and affordable to bring a high level of style into a home without giving up performance and durability,” added Thorn-Brooks.
