The trade show hangover
AM Survivor #11
You know the feeling, right? You’ve been preparing for it for weeks—sometimes even months. You design a really clever booth, perfected down to the smallest detail. There’s vision, there’s style, there’s innovation. Employees have new, fancy company uniforms. You’ve produced a great catalog and flyers. There are even extra-special business cards—this time printed in 3D!
At the booth? A whole array of new products, sophisticated reference parts, giveaways for visitors, and special offers for customers created specifically for the event.
The event itself? Spectacular! Loads of visitors, plenty of interesting and intriguing projects to pursue, and lots of new contacts. As for visitor numbers—the organizer says last year’s record was broken again.
You took tons of photos and reels videos, posting them on social media during and after the event. Lots of reactions, plenty of flattering comments. A major media outlet even mentioned you in their event coverage.
After coming back—before you even unpack—you send follow-up emails to all the new contacts you met at the trade show, thanking them for stopping by the booth and hoping to start the collaboration you discussed.
Now you sit and wait for replies.
A day.
A week.
A second week.
You send more emails or make phone calls.
You get either short, vague responses like “soon,” “not long now,” “next quarter”… or no response at all.
In the end—you close three new deals. Which don’t even cover a third of the travel expenses.
The whole plan, the whole strategy—down the drain… And the worst part is, this was your main strategy for the next six months!
So, in 2025, is it still worth going to AM trade shows and conferences?
That was actually my original title idea for this article, but I decided it was too bland. Still, it’s an important question, and more and more people are asking me about it.
Unfortunately, the best answer is: it depends.
It depends on the company—it depends on the trade show or conference. If a company is presenting a very innovative—but also very niche—technological solution, attending an event dedicated specifically to AM allows them to reach their most targeted audience and gain the most relevant traction.
However, if you’re trying to acquire customers from other industries, other verticals, an AM event is no longer the best choice.
It’s much better to exhibit at a trade show where your potential customers are exhibiting themselves.
But you also have to prepare differently for that—just a bit differently than for AM trade shows or conferences.
Let’s start with the obvious: if you want to sell a 3D printer to a company that isn’t looking for a 3D printer, you don’t try to sell them a 3D printer. You try to sell them the things that can be made with it.
You start selling the final solutions, not the tool to make it, because no one is interested with the tool, if they don’t know what to use it?
That’s why it’s good to come to a trade show mainly with finished products that are relevant to the given vertical, and build your sales and marketing around them. You can even try to sell the printed parts themselves—while showing their real 3D printing production cost.
Let me give you an example…
This is just a theoretical example. But it didn’t happen in reality only because the application and industry I’m describing don’t have their own dedicated trade show. Nevertheless, we did have a number of direct meetings with companies—end users—who bought the products I’ll describe, and each time they were also very interested in buying the 3D printers themselves.
This was back in 2023—when Bambu Lab was only just entering the Polish market, and the prevailing standard was still the Ender 3 and Prusa i3 Mk3 (the Mini version was unsuitable due to its small build volume). If this happened today, I would definitely try selling the printers themselves rather than just the printed parts.
So, the industry in question is stretch ceilings (which I worked in for over a year). A stretch ceiling is a system where a special plastic foil or fabric is stretched over an aluminum frame installed at ceiling height. It’s perfectly smooth, has no seams, and can be backlit with LED strips, making the ceiling the main source of light. You can also mount standard lamps in it.
Installation is very quick (usually one day), clean, and inexpensive (cheaper than ceiling tiles, drywall, or even painting—which requires prior filling and smoothing).
To install the ceiling, you need some accessories. That’s what we specialized in producing:
colorful and flame-retardant rings for lighting installation
inspection grilles
tools for attaching seals
connectors for aluminum profiles.
Of these, only the rings were widely available on the market—but not in the colors and with the properties we offered. The rest were unique.
However, buying them from us was right on the edge of profitability—still attractive for us and the buyer, but not really viable for resale (and we got lots of inquiries about that). If we had specialized in selling 3D printers and filaments (which we didn’t), that would have been our core business. Selling them to companies, who would produce the afromentioned products for own use or for sales or for both.
We chose otherwise—and, well… But that’s another story.
So, to sum up:
find a market niche or specialization in a given industry
research it and verify whether 3D printing can bring real benefits there
if yes, produce parts or products suitable for that industry
ideally, develop them in consultation with a company representative from that field as part of a partnership.
Only then exhibit at such a trade show—either alone or together with the partner company
Back to the question of trade shows…
3D printing trade shows, in their current form, are losing their relevance. I don’t mean the biggest events like Formnext, TCT Asia, or Rapid—those are essential, because any mature industry like AM should have its flagship events at certain times on each continent.
However, local events are starting to lose their purpose. In most cases, they feature mostly distributors or local machine manufacturers (and there are fewer and fewer of those), showing largely the same solutions. The level of innovation at local events is low. And the visitors to trade shows, in most cases, are already familiar with these products and treat the event more as a ritual (or a paid business trip) than a genuine purchasing objective.
As a result, I rate participation in such events poorly.
On the other hand, exhibiting at trade shows from completely different sectors—where no one expects to see a 3D printer—makes a lot of sense. Provided, of course, that the company presents something truly interesting and tailored to the nature of the event.
Also, remember that showing a 3D printer at a non-3D-printing event makes much less sense than showing parts and products from the relevant industry. The 3D printer should be just a gadget or display element—it shouldn’t play the leading role.
That way, you can avoid the trade show hangover—and not feel like you’ve thrown money down the drain.