Hardware Pioneers Max is the largest UK exhibition and conference dedicated to cutting-edge electronic hardware tech for engineering teams.

Held annually at the Business Design Centre, the event welcomes over 3,000 attendees and 140 exhibitors. The event team prides themselves on delivering an event that is as disruptive as the industry it serves and is mindful its technologically advanced audience expects the highest caliber of event tech experience

Seamus Doig, Event Manager at Hardware Pioneers, spent many years searching for the perfect online exhibitor manual solution until he saw a demo of FFAIR.

“The biggest problem in our company was creating an event software stack that complemented our user expectations, specifically the exhibitor experience. We have tested many online exhibitor manuals over several years. We found them to be outdated, hard to use and error-prone. It got to the point where we used software outside the event industry normally used for content and document collection. This worked to a point but we would lose hours daily answering exhibitor questions because of the complexity in the software. In the three months before the event, a vast majority of my job was managing exhibitors through the software rather than focusing on delivering the event itself.

The exhibitor manual became a real headache and the central challenge for our business. We decided we had to prioritise finding a solution and build the rest of the event stack around it.

We visited Event Tech Live in 2022 and met with as many exhibitor manual providers as we could. We struggled to find a solution that wasn’t outdated or had limited functions or provided a bad user experience. We stopped by the FFAIR stand, had a live demo, and we were blown away by how far ahead it was compared to the other solutions we’d seen. 

We liked that Adam [Jones, CEO] was from an events background and had developed the product from his own experiences. He understood all the issues we were facing, and it was evident that FFAIR could easily manage the tiered system of exhibitors we had as well as dealing with other stakeholders.

It’s really improved our user experience and provided clarity for our exhibitors. We can share a lot of detailed information in a very task-oriented way, ensuring that exhibitors understand the information before they can proceed to another task. The result is that the task completion rate is much higher than with any other software we’ve previously used.

The Shop function allows us to combine all our suppliers’ inventory - from AV, catering, and even furniture into one single portal. We’ve seen online orders dramatically increase from previous events with our exhibitors investing more in stand extras such as TVs for demo and display units, electronics, all of which improves the event experience for them and the attendees.

It’s a much easier way for exhibitors to understand what they need to do and overall, the questions I receive from exhibitors have significantly dropped. I was spending hours each day managing services for our exhibitors - now I’m spending just a handful of hours a week managing them.

We’ve made FFAIR part of our exhibitor onboarding process and give them a live demo of FFAIR, months ahead of the show. This buys exhibitors time to think about how they are going to exhibit and what they are going to have on the stand and as a result, improves their ROI.

Our first-time exhibitors understandably have a lot of questions, but I’ve found that once they see FFAIR, the vast majority of their questions are answered. Exhibitors are always very impressed and some exhibitors who exhibit regularly at other events say that FFAIR is the best solution they’ve experienced. This positive pre-event experience helps our client relationships and helps our event brand of being tech-savvy.

I like the monthly development updates from the team and value having input into the development roadmap. The transparency of the roadmap helps us as an event team, see where we can maximise the platform to our advantage for our upcoming event.

FFAIR has quickly become one of the key elements of our event experience and is the glue that brings together the rest of our event tech stack. It’s adaptability and range of features I haven’t seen in any other exhibitor management tool.

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