By Ray Smith, Exhibit City News
Before she was hired as marketing consultant for Triga Displays, Yolande Kruger was hooked like a fish on the company’s eye-catching tradeshow exhibit product.
She’d been a customer for more than a decade and made the career leap to support the marketing efforts of Triga founder Alphons du Toit, a man she describes as the “quiet, brilliant mind” behind the patented tension technology at the heart of Triga’s display solutions.
Headquartered in South Africa with locations in Australia, United Kingdom, Brazil and United States, Triga produces a unique exhibit display that’s so simple to construct, any 12-year-old with a little Lego experience can put it together.
Triga’s displays are unique in every facet, from setup to teardown without the use of tools, to being sturdy and rugged, lightweight, flexible and versatile. The system’s structural modularity allows formation of 45-degree angles for an L-shape, T-shape, X-shape, even a zigzag.
“There is nothing I don’t love about the brand and the down-to-earth but passionate team behind it,” Kruger says in a FaceTime interview from South Africa. “The epic journey we have had with the brand and its development is testimony to his (du Toit’s) engineering genius and the support from our local master distributors.”
KING OF FABRIC FRAMES
The common denominator for modular frame manufacturers is the use of silicone edge graphics (SEG). It’s the king of fabric print signage seen in retail showrooms, convention halls and tradeshows.
Triga Max, launched in 2006, was designed by du Toit, a mechanical engineer from Cape Town, and his former business partner, Dietmar Renner. The heavy-duty, weight-bearing system can accommodate LCD screens, shelving, cable displays and a host of bespoke mounts.
Du Toit came out with Triga Go in 2018. With its low-density polyethylene frame and lightweight components, Triga Go is perfect for smaller booths, 10-foot-by-20-foot, for example. It won the 2020 European Product Design Award for exhibition and tradeshow display.
COST EFFECTIVE
Triga is building its reputation for a display solution that “puts money back in your pocket,” Kruger says. “The era of chipboard and MDF display solutions, which are cumbersome to install, a hassle to keep past the event, and expensive to refurbish and re-use, is coming to an end.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge for Triga is the misperception that the product is a normal fabric banner wall, which can lead to pricing squabbles, the marketing consultant concedes. Triga systems come at a premium price compared to other products, but the long-term value for end users is unmatched, Kruger claims.
“It’s not just another wall, counter or totem,” she explains. “Confidently, we can say that no other system provides the aesthetic appeal, flexibility, modularity or user-friendly mechanics.”
While a marketer might purchase a combination of systems to achieve a particular design for a campaign, Triga customers can use the same hardware and reconfigure the design to achieve the original look for another event with different requirements.
“Marketing budgets are not what they used to be,” Kruger notes. “The pandemic put a serious dent in marketing budgets and people recognize they need to be smarter. They need multi-use systems.”
