Exhibitor guide to Vegas Market

Market is expensive, exhausting, and easy to get wrong. You spend months preparing, a small fortune on the space, and then it's over in a few days. The brands that come home with a full order book aren't usually the ones with the flashiest booth. They're the ones who did the boring prep well and made buyers feel like the easiest part of their week.

This guide gives you a clean to-do list for the market, laid out plainly. Some of it you already do. And in a couple of places we'll be straight with you about where a digital tool actually helps and where it's just extra cost you don't need yet.

Take what's useful. Ignore the rest.

📥 Free download — Market Prep Checklist + Booth Packing List (PDF) The whole guide as a two-page printable you can hand to your team.

Before You Go

1. Get your product information straight

The single most common way to lose a sale at market is friction. A buyer asks a specific question, your rep says "let me get back to you," and the moment cools. By the time you follow up, they've written orders with three other brands.

So before anything else, make sure someone on your team can answer, on the spot:

✓Exact dimensions, materials, and finishes for every piece you're showing
✓Current pricing — and current is the operative word. Old price lists floating around cause real problems.
✓Lead times per product line, including the honest ones, not the optimistic ones
✓What's actually available to customize, and what isn't

A quick gut check: pull up a random SKU right now and see how long it takes you to find its current price and lead time. If it takes more than a few seconds, your reps will feel that same lag in front of a buyer.

You don't need software to fix this. A clean, shared, up-to-date price and spec sheet that everyone trusts beats a fancy system nobody updates. The goal is one source of truth, not ten spreadsheets with slightly different numbers.

2. Sort out your samples

Physical samples are still how serious buyers make decisions. They want to feel the fabric, see the finish in real light, check the weight of a drawer pull. Don't fight that.

✓Physical swatches for your best sellers, organized so a rep can grab them fast
✓A plan for what you'll run out of, because you will run out of something
✓A simple way to track which samples went to which buyer
✓Reorders placed early enough to actually arrive

The honest problem with samples is bulk and cost. You can't carry 40 fabrics for every frame, and swatches walk off. That's a real constraint, and it's the one place where showing options on a screen (a tablet with your fabric range, a simple visualizer, whatever you've got) genuinely earns its keep — not to replace the samples, but to let buyers browse the full range before you pull the three swatches they actually care about. More on that later.

3. Prepare your people, not just your products

Your reps will know the catalog. Where they usually struggle is the customization conversation — the "can I get this in a different fabric / bigger / with a different base?" question.

There's a big difference between "let me check if that's possible" and "yes, and here's what it'll cost and how long it'll take." The second one closes orders. The first one loses momentum.

✓Everyone can tell the story behind your hero pieces, not just recite specs
✓Everyone knows the real lead times cold
✓Everyone knows what can and can't be customized, and roughly what it costs
✓You've actually rehearsed the awkward questions

Run a mock booth conversation before you go. Have someone play a skeptical buyer. It feels silly and it's worth every minute.

At the Show

4. Make your space easy to move through

Buyers walk dozens of showrooms a day. By hour four they're tired and everything blurs together. You're not competing on having the most product on the floor. You're competing on being the space where they could think clearly.

✓A clear path through the space, with your strongest pieces where the eye lands first
✓Room to sit down and write an order without feeling cramped
✓Don't crowd every variation onto the floor — a few strong, well-styled pieces beat a wall of options

That last point matters more than it sounds. Too much choice on the floor doesn't read as "look how much we offer," it reads as clutter, and it wears people out. Show your best expressions of a piece and have a way to talk through the rest.

5. Capture who was interested, and in what

This is the one people skip and regret. The conversation is vivid on day one. Three weeks later it's a blur of business cards and you can't remember who liked the walnut dining table and who wanted the oak.

✓A consistent way to collect contact info (whatever works, as long as everyone uses it)
✓A note on what each buyer actually cared about
✓A rough sense of who's a hot lead versus a browser

Even a shared notes doc or a stack of index cards works. The tool doesn't matter. The discipline does. "Here's the sectional you liked in the navy velvet" is a follow-up that gets a reply. "Great meeting you at market" gets ignored.

📥 Free download — Buyer Lead Capture Card (PDF) A print-and-go card to jot who visited, what they liked, and the follow-up you owe them. Fill one out per buyer while it's fresh.

6. Handle customization like it's the opportunity it is

Custom and semi-custom work often carries your best margins, and it's where buyers hesitate most, because they can't quite picture it and they're afraid of getting it wrong.

Two things reduce that hesitation:

Show them, don't tell them. Anything that helps a buyer see the variation — a swatch on the frame, a rendering, a past project photo — beats describing it.
Remove the fear of a bad order. Be clear about what combinations actually work. Nothing kills trust faster than a buyer discovering the config they were quoted can't actually be built.

✓A fast way to show or describe custom options
✓A clear, repeatable way to quote them
✓Honest custom lead times
✓A way to prevent impossible combinations from being promised

💡 A quick aside, since it usually comes up here. When people hear "show them the variation on a screen," two objections show up fast: it'll be too expensive and the renders will look fake. Both are mostly outdated. We wrote an honest, vendor-side breakdown of where those ideas come from and where they no longer hold: Debunking the 3D Configurator Myths. Worth a read before you rule anything in or out.

After the Show

7. Follow up fast, and be specific

Speed is most of the game here. The first brand to follow up with something relevant has a real edge. By week three the buyer is drowning in generic thank-you emails.

✓Follow-ups out within 48 hours while it's fresh
✓Each one personalized to what that buyer actually looked at
✓Relevant images and pricing included, so they don't have to ask
✓A clear next step, not just "let us know"

This is where the notes from step 5 pay off. Specific beats polished. A slightly rough email that references the exact piece they liked will out-perform a beautiful generic one every time.

📥 Free download — Post-Market Follow-Up Email Templates (PDF) Four copy-paste emails — hot lead, "here's what you looked at," the polite nudge, and the sample/quote reply — so you can send within 48 hours instead of a week.

8. Learn something for next time

The brands that get better at market are the ones who look back honestly.

✓Which pieces drew the most attention?
✓Which conversations turned into orders, and why?
✓What did buyers keep asking for that you didn't have?
✓What would your team change about the booth or the flow?

Write it down while it's fresh. Next year's prep starts with this year's notes.

So, Do You Actually Need a 3D Configurator?

Here's the straight answer, since we build these for a living and you'd be right to be skeptical of anyone selling one.

You probably don't need one if: your line is mostly fixed pieces with a handful of finishes, your reps can already answer customization questions easily, and buyers rarely stall over "what would it look like in...". A clean price sheet and good samples cover you. Don't spend money solving a problem you don't have.

It's worth a serious look if you recognize these headaches:

✓Customers regularly can't picture the variations, and that hesitation costs you custom orders.
✓Your reps burn real time flipping between module sheets, price lists, and fabric books to build one quote, and mistakes slip through.
✓You carry a huge fabric or finish range you can't physically bring to market.
✓You're selling modular or made-to-order pieces where the number of combinations is genuinely hard to show any other way.
✓Buyers want to see it in their own space or their client's, and static photos aren't cutting it.

If that's you, the value isn't the 3D novelty. It's three practical things: buyers see the exact config before committing, quotes come out faster and more accurate, and the picture they explored becomes your follow-up material and your e-commerce imagery later. That's it. If a vendor is selling you more than that, be skeptical.

Still on the fence? Two reads that go deeper without the sales pitch:

✓Do I Actually Need a Furniture Configurator? — walks through the honest yes/no.
✓How Much Does a 3D Configurator Cost? — breaks down real pricing, including the per-variant trap that quietly inflates quotes, so the number doesn't catch you off guard.

And you don't have to boil the ocean. Start with your most-customized, hardest-to-visualize category — the one causing the most "let me get back to you" moments — and leave the simple stuff alone.

The tools matter less than the fundamentals. Get the prep, the conversations, and the follow-up right and you'll have a good market with or without anything digital. If you do reach the point where showing and quoting custom work is your bottleneck, that's when it's worth a conversation about whether a configurator earns its place — and not a minute before.