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

Abstracta Featured in Herman Miller's Chicago Showroom to Exhibit Alexander Girard's Work

     Once again our unique and versatile Abstracta Modular Display System is an integral part of an impressive exhibit of design talents. Abstracta is now featured in Herman Miller’s Chicago showroom on the 3rd floor of the Merchandise Mart. The photos here show our 13mm (1/2") tubing in white powder coat recently installed as part of NEOCON 2012. NEOCON - “where the design world comes together” - is the annual design event for the contract furniture industry. And, most anyone who visits NEOCON, visits the Herman Miller Showroom.
   Abstracta was chosen as the display medium by Michael McGinn Design as the “natural setting” to display the history of one of Herman Miller’s earliest and most formidable designers, Alexander Girard.
     In the words of the Herman Miller blog:

“Trained as an architect, but proficient in all manner of activities, Alexander Girard was introduced to Herman Miller through Charles Eames and George Nelson. He established the Herman Miller Textile Division in 1952, and served as its Director of Design until 1973. From his outpost in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he designed over 300 textiles in multitudes of colorways, multiple collections of wallpaper, decorative prints and wall hangings, an expansive group of furniture, and both decorative and useful objects.”

     His textiles and objects, although wonderful and intriguing on their own, seemed even more dynamic and brilliant in the thoughtful, seemingly simple (although very complex!) setting of the slim, white Abstracta forms and “just right” spot lighting and traffic patterns throughout the exhibit.

     The Girard exhibit comprises about 1,000 square feet of the extensive Herman Miller Showroom. The exhibit will be up for almost one year and may travel a bit after that to other venues. The 1,400+ Abstracta tubes and 800+ connectors were all pre-cut and finished prior to being delivered to the site and the McGinn Design team had the entire structure up in about three days! An impressive and amazing feat.

     We at Consort are also pleased with Michael McGinn's thoughtful words when we saw him at the exhibit on opening day: "I would say that for this audience the second most popular thing about the exhibit, after Alexander Girard, is Abstracta. I overheard many remarks about its simple beauty."

Thank you  Michael  for choosing Abstracta!

Photos courtesty of Bright-Lyons, Brooklyn, New York.

New BannerFlex Banner Bracket Online Store!

Consort’s new http://www.bannerflex.com/ banner bracket online store is now up and running. The new store makes the ordering of our street pole banner brackets easy and swift. There are two ways to go through the site and the products depending on how much you do or do not know about ordering the proper banner hardware for your project.

If you’re familiar with our BannerFlex® products it may be quicker for you to use the “Shop by Products” link at the upper left on the home page. If you need assistance on which brackets might be best and you would like to be guided through to the other accessories to consider, you can choose the “Guided Purchasing” option the menu bar at the top of the page.

The “Guided Purchasing” process is pretty impressive, actually! It begins with asking the type and size of light pole or utility pole and asks what size of banners you are considering. Once you’ve made those choices, the bracket options which are appropriate for your pole and your size of banners are shown with information attached to each bracket to help you make a selection. You can also choose regular aluminum color brackets or black powder coated at that time. After the brackets are chosen, attachment methods are given and, depending on your previous choices, either screw gear banding and/or tool-applied banding may be shown. Both of those options will be shown in both regular stainless steel color and black.

Other accessories are shown on the store which may be of interest. For example, the Wall Mount Plates are becoming more popular for folks wishing to mount vertical banners on buildings or large columns. Check out the three different shapes that we now offer.

We hope you’ll visit the new store soon. As always, if you have questions about these or any Consort products please email or call us at 800.525.6424 or 269.388.4532 and we’ll respond immediately. If you have any suggestions or comments about the new store please let us know!
Roger Lepley

View KBW Banners on Your Street Poles Before You Buy!

     Do you have a potentially new light pole banner project and you’re just not sure how the banners will look on your poles? If so, here’s some information for you. Our KBW/Consort art staff can show you exactly how those banners will “welcome” folks to your designated place.
     First, let me show you some actual before-and-after photos to get the idea rolling and then I’ll show you some “Photoshopped" images on poles with banners added digitally. The campus photos here are from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Again, these are actual photos, not enhanced in any way. As you may be able to discern, the photos showing no banners were taken in late summer and the photos of the same locations, but with banners, were taken in early fall. Although the Hope College campus is in itself a wonderful place without banners, the addition of banners in certain locations adds a confident “invitation” to visitors and perhaps even a “sense of pride” for the students and the campus in general.

     Now, back to the question of how your location will appear or be enhanced prior to actually installing banners let’s look at the City of Monona, Wisconsin. The City supplied some photos of the intersection of Monona Drive and Broadway where they were considering adding banners to invite folks and show that sense of pride and place that is so important to all of our cities. In this case, Monona is a wonderful lakeside community adjacent to Madison. In order to assist in sustaining and promoting its own heritage and attributes, Monona has used light pole banners for many years in other areas, notably the well-known Monona Terrace. However, in helping to determine if larger banners were to be installed on a major thoroughfare, the city supplied our in-house sales representative, Corey Rolfe, with photos showing the “bare” light poles. Then, our Industrial Designer, Eastan Bakka, “installed” the single blue banners digitally onto the photo using Photoshop® - notice how the perspective and lighting is especially “real” with the four banners – pretty good, eh?! Yes.

     As it turns out, the city decided to purchase the banners, and our BannerFlex hardware, but made the change for single banners on many poles to double banners on less poles. They did not need us to show them that presentation.
     I hope this helps to explain the option of “mocking up” potential banner projects and how light pole banners can increase the look of success and pride in a neighborhood or campus.

Roger Lepley

Consort Adds to Waterjet Machining Capability

     Consort is pleased to announce the newest addition to our family. No, it’s not a baby! It’s an OMAX 80X WaterJet Machining Center. This amazing machine has a cutting bed of 13 feet long by 6.5 feet wide and will cut virtually any material including aluminum, steel, iron, titanium and high-tech composites as well as marble, granite, glass, tile, stone, wood and plastics.

     This new machine joins our smaller version, the OMAX 55100, that we’ve had for the past five years. Both machining centers are under the care of our in-house waterjet expert, Bryan Lepley, who attended the OMAX training center in Kent, Washington and who supervises the operation and maintenance. Also, our in-house design staff has been integral in joining Bryan with designing and programming for the machine.
     We purchased the first machine to assist us with manufacturing our own products but word spread that we possessed this capability and now we are pleased to be doing subcontract work for many Michigan-based manufacturing companies. Due to increased demand, we felt it necessary to increase our capability and this new machine is just the ticket! It’s an amazing device and we invite you to contact us for a tour.
     Some of the more unusual custom projects have been aircraft parts, huge steel tank parts and gaskets, many prototype components for local manufacturers, parts for Stanley Steamer automobile reproductions, granite and stone landscaping pieces and many others.

     For our own product lines, we’ve shown our restaurant-oriented line of hostess stands, chalk boards and logo wall signs at the past three National Restaurant Shows in Chicago in May and have enjoyed designing many projects for restaurants and  hotels around the US and Canada.
     In further explanation, a waterjet machine is simple in concept but, of course, the machine is an extremely complex, high-tech machine. It’s basically a very fine stream of water under pressure of up to 55,000 psi (your kitchen faucet is probably 50 to 100 psi, for example). And, garnet abrasive, a powdery sand-type material is streamed along with the water. The high pressure water combined with the abrasive will cut up to 6” thick solid steel. And, it cuts the material slightly underwater to minimize splashing. You need to see it to believe it!
     Please check out our custom waterjet site and let us know if we can interest you in using this amazing technology.
Roger Lepley