By Emily Olson; Photo credit: Exposures Ltd.
Studio Displays’ booth for Kurz rose from the CES tradeshow floor like an alien spaceship, a giant mirrored cube that beckoned tradeshow attendees to take a look inside.
Studio Displays serves as the exhibit house for Kurz, so this was by no means the first time the two organizations have worked together. According to Emily Malavolta, senior account manager at Studio Displays, however, this experience was a bit different.
“Kurz is a German company,” Malavolta explains. “For CES, their German agency designed the exhibit and we fabricated it.” Taking a design from rendering to show floor is no easy task, however. “Things always look gorgeous in the rendering,” she says. “But the engineering of a design isn’t always taken into consideration. There are no structural qualities included. Elements float with no support, for example. And to not only figure out the engineering to make it happen, but build it in a way that it can stand by itself, come apart and go together again on the tradeshow floor takes a mad amount of skill on multiple levels.”
That mad amount of skill went into building a stop-in-your-tracks kind of booth that perfectly illustrates who Kurz is. “Kurz makes functional parts for car interiors. Their elements are essential in auto manufacture, but they’re kind of an unseen business in the automotive industry,” says Malavolta. “The idea behind the mirrored cube is that Kurz reflects everything around them. It’s not until you enter the space that you see who Kurz really is.”
The 20 by 20 by 20 cube is completely covered in mirrored plexiglass on the outside, and the inside walls were covered by light boxes that also were 20 by 20. The light boxes were Malavolta’s favorite part. “That application was pulled off perfectly,” she says. “It was very futuristic.”
And what did show goers think of the display? “People were amazed by the sheer size of it,” Malavolta says. “We left the protective film on the mirrored plexiglass until the last day of set-up. When the mirrors were finally revealed, it was very awe-inspiring.”
Malavolta says that taking a design from rendering to planning to executing was an incredibly rewarding experience. “The fact that our engineers was able to pull this off, and do it quickly, speaks to the quality of the people we have here at Studio Displays.”
