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A Trade Show Booth for Impact Suite

A 20-foot booth that sold mental health benefits to HR teams and brokers at SHRM and World of Work.

The Impact Suite booth on a show floor: a deep blue backwall reading “A Better Approach to Mental Health,” a white demo counter with two iPads, a high table with stools, and shelves of app cards on the side wall.

A trade show booth has about three seconds to explain itself. People are walking past, holding a tote bag full of stress balls, deciding whether to make eye contact. This one had to say “mental health benefits” before they looked away.

While I was a brand designer at Impact Suite, I designed our booth for trade show season. Impact Suite makes apps that help people manage anxiety and depression and overcome addiction, and companies offer them as an employee benefit. So the people we needed to reach weren’t app users. They were HR representatives and benefits brokers.

The brief

The booth is 20 feet wide, 8 feet deep and 10 feet tall. It traveled to SHRM conferences, World of Work and several other mental health and benefits shows.

It had to handle two very different kinds of visitors:

  • The serious buyer who wants to sit down and see the product.
  • The passerby who has two minutes and one question.

So I split the space in two. One side has a high table and stools for real sales demos. The other side has a counter with two iPads for quick conversations, with the shelf wall right behind it to point at.

The design

A 3D render of the booth front: the Impact Suite logo and “A Better Approach to Mental Health” on the blue backwall, a white counter reading “Leading the Paradigm Shift in Mental Health” with two iPads, and a side wall of shelves labeled with each service.
The demo counter and the services wall. Render by Exponents Insta USA.

Trade show floors are loud, so the booth says one thing at a time. The backwall carries a single headline, “A Better Approach to Mental Health,” on Impact Suite’s deep blue, with a scatter of app screens and real faces running diagonally behind it. The counter repeats the promise in plain type: “Leading the Paradigm Shift in Mental Health.”

The side wall does the selling. Each shelf names one service (unlimited teletherapy, mental health coaching, on-demand self-help tools, leadership consulting and 24/7 crisis support), so a salesperson can walk someone through the whole offering without a brochure.

A 3D render of the booth from the right: the high demo table and stools on the left, the counter in the middle and the tall end wall with a large phone graphic.
A 3D render of the booth from the left: a wall-mounted screen and “Your Comprehensive Mental Health Partner” above the demo table, with the counter and shelves to the right.

On the floor

The finished booth (the photo at the top of this post) matched the renders closely, which is the best thing you can say about a booth. Environmental work is fun that way: you design it on a laptop, and then it shows up on a convention floor at full size.