Why the Weight of Your Exhibit Is a Financial Decision
When we evaluate exhibit systems, we tend to ask the same questions. What does it cost? How fast can we build it? How flexible is it? How long will it last?
All important questions. But there’s another one I think we should be asking more often:
How much does it weigh?
We spend a lot of time talking about running Leaner operations in our industry. Maybe one way to get Lean is literally to lose some weight.
Weight is usually treated like a product specification. We see it on a spec sheet, think about it when we’re calculating freight, and then move on to something more exciting. Admittedly, almost everything is more exciting than calculating freight.
But weight isn’t just a product specification. It’s an operational cost. And if we’re serious about applying Lean principles to our businesses, maybe we should be looking at the physical products moving through our operations as closely as we look at the processes around them.
We Move This Stuff. A Lot
Reusable exhibit inventory doesn’t move once. Anyone who has spent time in an exhibit warehouse knows this.
A component gets pulled from inventory, inspected, staged, packed and loaded onto a truck. It gets shipped to an event, unloaded, moved through the venue and handled by an installation crew. A few days later, we do the whole thing again but in reverse.
Back at the warehouse, it gets unloaded again, inspected again and put away. Eventually somebody pulls it for another job and the cycle starts over.
Potentially for 10, 15, or even 20 years.
Some of this stuff spends more time on the road than Blaike Rathbun.
That’s why the number on the specification sheet isn’t really what interests me. I want to know how much weight we’re going to move over the lifetime of that product.
Those are two very different numbers.
Getting Lean by Getting Lighter
Lean has influenced manufacturing for decades, but you don’t need to be a Lean manufacturing expert to understand the basic idea: create value and eliminate unnecessary waste.
We already do this in the exhibit industry. We try to reduce installation time. We organize warehouses to make picking easier. We look for ways to improve inventory utilization. We design better carts and crates. We spend countless hours figuring out how to take labor out of a build.
Sometimes, though, I think we focus so much on improving the process that we forget to look at the stuff we’re actually putting through the process.
If two components accomplish the same job and meet the same requirements for functionality, durability, and safety, but one weighs significantly less, that matters. And no, lighter isn’t automatically better.
Taking material out of a product only creates value if you can do it without taking performance out with it.
If reducing weight compromises durability, structural performance or useful life, we haven’t eliminated waste—we’ve just moved the cost somewhere else. But if you can accomplish the same job with less material and less mass, now we’re talking about something worth measuring.
Five Pounds Isn’t Really Five Pounds
Here’s a simple example.
Imagine an exhibit company owns 1,000 reusable structural components. Now imagine an alternative component that performs the same function but weighs five pounds less.
Five pounds? Who cares?
Across 1,000 pieces of inventory, that’s 5,000 pounds.
That’s two Honda Fits getting shipped around all year for no reason.
Use 10 percent of that inventory on a project and that’s 500 pounds you don’t have to move. Then you do another show. And another one. And another one.
Suddenly those five pounds have become the employee who never clocks out.
Depending on your operation, that weight might affect freight, material handling, truck utilization, or simply the amount of material your people are physically moving every day.
I’m not suggesting there’s some magical formula where reducing exhibit weight by 20 percent cuts your operating costs by 20 percent. There isn’t. Freight doesn’t work that way, and neither does our industry.
But we measure just about everything else. We analyze labor rates. We negotiate freight. We scrutinize material-handling invoices. We’ll spend an afternoon debating a few dollars on the purchase price of a component we’re going to own for 15 years.
It seems a little strange, then, that we don’t spend more time looking at the pounds driving some of those costs.
And It’s Not Just the Truck
Freight is the obvious place everyone’s mind goes when we start talking about weight. But walk through an exhibit warehouse and watch what actually happens to a piece of inventory.
Someone receives it. Someone puts it away. Someone pulls it. Maybe it gets moved around a couple more times while everyone figures out where it’s supposed to go. Moved again when we need to store some stuff for a client. Then someone stages it, packs it and loads it.
At the show, another group of people unloads it, moves it and builds with it.
Then we tear everything down and reverse the process.
That’s a lot of touches, and the customer doesn’t receive any additional value because your team had to move an extra 500 pounds of structural material to create the exact same finished exhibit.
Nobody has ever walked into a booth and said, “This looks incredible. I just wish it had been harder to get here.”
And that’s where I think the Lean argument gets interesting. I’m not arguing that we should make everything lighter just for the sake of making it lighter. I’m asking whether all the weight we’re moving is actually necessary to deliver what the customer is paying us to deliver.
Purchase Price Isn’t the Whole Story
We’re all conditioned to focus on acquisition price. It makes sense. It’s right there on the quote and it’s easy to compare.
But if you’re going to own that inventory for 10 or 15 years, the purchase price is only part of what you’re actually buying.
That product is going to travel. People are going to handle it. You’re going to store it. You’re going to install it, dismantle it, and hopefully use it to generate revenue over and over again.
That’s why, when I think about the economics of an exhibit system, I want to know more than what it costs today. I want to know what owning it is going to look like five or 10 years from now.
All this stuff is supposed to create ROI…amiright? One way to create ROI in a time of inflation is to deflate your ongoing costs.
Just Ask for the Data
This doesn’t need to turn into a six-month consulting project.
If you’re evaluating a major inventory purchase, ask suppliers for published product weights along with the pricing. Take one of your typical projects and calculate the structural weight. Look at how often you execute projects like it, how you ship them, what you pay for material handling and how often that inventory gets touched.
Then run the numbers over five or 10 years.
Maybe the difference is huge. Maybe it’s surprisingly small. Either result is useful because at least now you know.
And that’s better than making a six-figure inventory decision based entirely on purchase price and a really nice PowerPoint presentation.
So, What Does It Cost to Move?
Our industry is being asked to become more efficient from just about every direction.
Labor isn’t getting cheaper. Transportation isn’t getting simpler. Material handling remains under constant scrutiny. Customers still expect us to find smarter ways to execute their programs without sacrificing the experience.
And, unfortunately, nobody seems to be volunteering to make any of this cheaper.
I don’t think one giant innovation is going to solve that. More likely, we’re going to find a bunch of smaller opportunities that add up. Weight might be one of them. Time is another. Have you noticed everyone has a tool to connect things faster all of a sudden?
A few pounds sitting on a specification sheet doesn’t look particularly important. Multiply those pounds across hundreds of components, dozens of events and years of reuse and the math starts looking different.
A pound sitting in your warehouse is pretty harmless.
Ship it around the country for the next 15 years, and it develops an expense account and doesn’t report its receipts…
So the next time you’re evaluating exhibit inventory, don’t just ask what it costs to buy.
Ask one more question:
What is it going to cost us to move?
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