To say InstallerSHOW has gotten bigger would be an understatement. It’s now across Hall 4 and 5 of the NEC, with plans to grow further next year too. Only a few years ago it was at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, which is hard to believe, but testament to the hard-working team behind the show.
Refresh has been involved since the early days, with a partnership in place to announce the winners of Refresh’s Heating Installer Awards at the show each year. With no snazzy evening do at an expensive London hotel this keeps costs down, meaning we can spend more on the awards and ensure value for money for the sponsors. It also brings installers to the show – a real win-win.
For the first time this year, Refresh also took an exhibition stand, creating The Refresh Lounge next door to the Heating Installer Awards stand. For us, this turned out to be a genius move: one stand had a fridge with cold drinks on the hottest day of the year, the other a boxing game that drew in the crowds!
The Refresh day one team diary:
- Early start following the CIPHE event the previous night (eek!)
- Media meetings with key editors for two different clients – we juggled briefings
- Refresh-ments delivered around the exhibition hall to hard-working exhibitors, in our new Deliveroo-style bag. Watch out for more of this soon!
- Meetings with brands wanting to sponsor the Heating Installer Awards 2025 (are we actually saying this already?!)
- Meetings with brands looking for marketing and PR ideas, opinions and our advice
- Managing lots of bruised egos on the Heating Installer Stand as the record for the hardest punch fell time and time again
- Met lots of installers interested in entering the awards next year
- Caught up with some of our Award Legends, many of whom were working on stands for brands at the show
- Social media, social media…and more social media! Content creation really helped us get eyes on our brand
- InstallerMERIT in the evening to find out who had won Installer’s awards
The show around us was non-stop. Stands were serving free pints, free food, free ice cream, and everywhere there was a game to pull in the crowds. We almost found ourselves ready to ‘toss a turd’ into an on-stand toilet at one point, but shrank back into the crowd to let someone else take the limelight.
Moreover, there was a real buzz of excitement at the new products on show, from boilers to drills to showers to radiators and much more. If you’re thinking of attending for one day, think again – this is definitely now a two-dayer, if not more! There are genuine conversations to be had with many of the brands who take their technical teams to the show to ensure questions from the trades can be answered. It is a day off the road that’s becoming an essential in many diaries.
For us, it was just great to catch up with so many familiar faces, and be able to spend time away from more formal meetings to relax in The Refresh Lounge. We did a lot right on day one in preparation for what was to come our way on day two…