Viridistor LLC used the International BoatBuilders Exhibition and Conference (IBEX) in Louisville, Kentucky last month to launch its Green Box™ solution which replaces the costs associated with the creation, shipping and handout of paper-based collateral for tradeshows and conferences. The new green technology won high praise from both exhibitors and attendees at the event.
The Green Box system is designed to significantly decrease show costs for exhibitor companies by reducing or eliminating the need to print thousands of brochures for every tradeshow. The solution allows attendees to gather as much information as they want without having to lug around large volumes of paper materials.
Instead, they can collect it all in electronic form and use Viridistor’s USB-based software applications to better manage and share it both at and after an event. In addition, the Green Box system is the most environmentally friendly product of its kind because it reduces the tremendous environmental impact associated with paper-based collateral.
Hundreds of Viridistor USB memory devices were distributed at the show as part of the system’s formal introduction to the tradeshow industry. The response from IBEX Show management, large corporate exhibitors and show attendees was virtually unanimous that the system is easy to use and fulfills its promise for reducing the use of paper-based materials at shows.
“Customers visiting our booth used to receive a binder containing seven different brochures for different product lines. Now all they have to do is plug a memory stick into the Green Box and leave our booth with all of that information and more,” said Mike Oathout, VP of sales and marketing at Taylor Made Systems, a division of Taylor Made Group, LLC. “That’s huge! It’s saving us money and making customer lives easier. The Viridistor solution seems like all upside to me.”
It was easy for the company to set up their content as well, according to Jeff Smith, marketing manager at Taylor Made Systems.
“Assembling content was amazingly easy; simple links to PDF files are really all that is needed to get information to your customer,” said Smith. “But if you want to go beyond the basics, there’s potential here to deliver so much more and it doesn’t have to be static content. You can make it even more interesting for your customer than traditional paper content ever was because now you can use content such as videos as well. For example, we have a brand new line of power-actuated products and for us to be able to show them actually in motion, working, as opposed to a still photo in a brochure, is really cool.”
“The biggest thing for me is that it offers a lower cost per impression,” said Sam Lamers, marketing manager at 3M Marine. “It’s quick and it’s easy and will definitely cut down on the volume of paper that people take to a show and bring home from the show. We had already started going down this path and this system validates our actions. This year we shipped the lowest volume of hard copies ever to IBEX. I had already placed my literature order before I was even in contact with Viridistor. We just feel it’s so much easier to get people specific pieces they need electronically, when they need them, and there’s no need to send anything and everything just to have it end up in a trash can.”
Echoing exhibitor comments, Terry Mullin, president and CEO of Viridistor, noted that the printing replacement cost that the Viridistor system offers over paper use is huge. One exhibitor shared they distributed an information kit that costs around $15 per set. Considering they brought 2,500 sets, that represented a cost of $37,500, excluding shipping and handling; and they still didn’t have enough for everyone attending the show.
Next year, that same kit will be distributed through the Green Box solution, with the inclusion of multimedia, audio/video and more. That’s less than $1.00 per impression and exhibitors will never run out of information. Plus, unlike paper handouts that are difficult to share among colleagues, with this system all of the content can be easily shared across the enterprise.
Attendees also indicated the Viridistor solution made their visit to IBEX more enjoyable.
“I ended up going to the post office in Louisville just to mail 21 pounds of literature back to my office since there was no way I could have included it all in my carry-on luggage,” said Mark Tracy, president of the Valley Isle Marine Center in Wailuku, Hawaii. “In addition, I still had other material in my briefcase and I didn’t collect everything I would have liked to because of the hassle of transporting it. I think it’s very significant that the marine industry is the first to sponsor a paperless tradeshow. Show participants will appreciate Viridistor’s digital solution to the costly and cumbersome problem of disseminating product information at tradeshows.”
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