Consort's Abstracta Shares Silver Award at GlobalShop 2015!

With the recent “Silver Award’ from the juried competition during the 2015 GlobalShop Show, our Abstracta Modular Display System is once again recognized as a world player! GlobalShop, the world's largest trade show for retail design and shopper marketing, is held in Las Vegas each March. The competition has become a much-anticipated event for showcasing outstanding recent retail-oriented projects around the world.

Our Abstracta system was the primary display medium for the Herman Miller “pop-up” store in New York City during May, 2014 where the large Michigan-based contract furniture company presented a striking, colorful and textural retrospective of Alexander Girard’s significant contribution to Herman Miller’s decades long success as an industry innovator.

In the words of a Metropolis Magazine editor, “The new Alexander Girard pop-up exhibit in New York’s Meatpacking District is a three-part celebration of all things Girard. The showcase highlights the architect and designer's fabric work, developed during his time as design director of the textiles department at Herman Miller from 1952 to 1973. Then there are the lounge pieces Girard produced for Braniff Airlines in the late 60s, a small number of the 17,000+ items he designed for the project. The third element is the striking exhibit installation, a Girard-esque living room, bursting with color and populated with period affects.”

The store layout was designed by Michael McGinn and his team at Standard Issue Design, of Brooklyn, New York and featured Girard’s most significant designs and patterns. For Consort, this was our second opportunity to work with Michael for a Herman Miller project with the first one

involving a 1,000 square foot portion of the company’s showroom at their massive showroom in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in 2012.

Abstracta was chosen for its simple and classic features that inherently take a back seat to displayed objects, such as Girard’s work, to be elegantly featured.  It was the perfect choice for the incredibly eye-catching array of Girard’s brilliant work. 

Thank you Michael and Herman Miller for again choosing Abstracta!

Roger Lepley

Simple, Inexpensive Trade Show Solutions from Consort Display Group!

Eye-catching, inexpensive options for the standard 10’ x 10’ booth.



Display One 8' digital panel

Today, trade show presenters prefer simpler, easier to setup and more cost-effective displays. And, in this digital age, you can now display “up-to-the-minute” products and services with the right trade show products and creative talent from Consort. We can help you customize each show’s images for specific audiences to maximize your trade show dollars.

Look to Consort for a dependable array of RTR™ Retractor Banner Stands, Display One® Messenger®-X Banner Stands, Table Throw Covers, PortFolio® Tabletop Displays, and more, for the simple 10 x 10 or 10 x 20 booth. With most products manufactured and printed in Michigan, you’ll receive the utmost in customer care and service. Need graphic design assistance? Consort has been in the design business since 1984.



Digitally-printed Table Throw Cover

 In our opinion, your product or service should be the “shining star” and the object of attention in your booth – not the fancy booth hardware! With wide-format digital printing, great lighting and simple podiums, for example, you can tell your story and capture the interest of your audience without lots of expensive hardware and quirky fixtures. Typically, those more complicated booths are expensive to purchase, expensive to ship and time-consuming to assemble. They may even require professional set-up labor. Our suggestion is have a few easily assembled and dis-assembled pieces that fill up your booth space with large digital images that help you tell your story.



33" x 86' Retractor Banner Stand

 Once your Consort trade show display is up and ready, probably in 30 minutes or less, the rest is up to you! We can’t supply the enthusiasm, bright-eyes and energetic sales force who will look each attendee in the eye and tell your story, but we can help you get noticed and help you visually get the ball rolling!

"Tradeshow exhibiting can be an effective and rewarding marketing tool. But, they can be more cost effective and enjoyable with displays from Consort Display Group."

Roger Lepley

“China, You Drive-a Me Crazy” or “Getting Knocked-Off Is Not As Much Fun As It Sounds”

As a product designer, I’m reminded too many times that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. And, after 30 years of hearing that, it still never fails to tick me off. It happens every time some jerk in our industry can’t come up with his own product innovations so he just can’t help himself from copying what we’ve designed here at Consort. Flatter me some other way (like: “nice double bogie, dude”…).
And, what makes it worse, these counterfeiters don’t even ask if it’s OK! (Well, of course they don’t ask. Jerks are jerks for a reason…)

Just today I received a package that contained a Chinese copy of one of our (formerly) unique Messenger®-X banner stand products. From a few feet away, one might be surprised to know that it isn’t our product – a pretty good knock-off, you might say (a “knock-off”, in case you aren’t familiar with the term, is defined as an unauthorized copy of something). However, once you really compare the two stands in operation, sophistication, weight (ours is precise aluminum tubing, theirs is heavy steel) and overall strength and stability, you know why it’s cheaper. But, of course, uninformed buyers tend to opt for the less expensive products, don’t they?

How many emails have you received lately for Rolex watches? I’ll bet there are plenty of those knock-offs being sold every day in the US.

The good news is that we design and manufacture things that people like. The not as good news is that some people like them enough to copy them (some are protected by US property rights laws – an expensive proposition - and some are not). Our challenge always has been to trust that higher quality and excellent customer service will drive the best and most discerning customers to us. Fortunately, it has usually worked that way for us.

As for China, the masters of counterfeiting and knock-offs, we do purchase our RTR Retractor Banner Stands from China because they are the only folks making those and they do a pretty good job. But, I hope to limit our Chinese purchases to only what they do well and to avoid buying Chinese knock-offs of other US manufacturers' products.


Roger Lepley