Every quote that takes two weeks started as a brief with holes in it. Not badly written — incomplete. The builder reads it, writes back three questions, waits two days for answers, and the calendar bleeds. Our fix is a twelve-field brief template. Clients who use it get a structured, line-itemised quote in 48 hours, reliably enough that we put the number on the home page.
The template is not clever. It is complete. Here are the twelve fields, and why each one is there.
The twelve fields
- 01 · Show and venue — name, hall, city. The venue sets the rulebook: rigging, heights, power, move-in windows.
- 02 · Stand number and orientation — an island reads differently from a corner; the same 24 m² can need two very different designs.
- 03 · Footprint — width × depth in metres, from the organiser's floor plan, not from memory.
- 04 · Height limit — the single most-missed constraint in briefs we receive. Halls clamp between 2.5 m and 6 m; guessing wrong invalidates a design.
- 05 · Raise-day and opening day — both dates. The gap between them is our build window on site.
- 06 · What happens on the stand — meetings, demos, sampling, retail? Function drives layout before aesthetics do.
- 07 · Headcount — staff on the stand at peak. Six people on 12 m² is a corridor, not a stand.
- 08 · Storage needs — stock, bags, coats. Unplanned storage steals a wall; planned storage disappears into the design.
- 09 · Brand kit — logo files, colour codes, any brand book pages that apply to space design.
- 10 · Reference images — two or three stands you liked, from any show anywhere, with one line on why.
- 11 · Budget bracket — a range is fine. It steers material and finish decisions before we draw, not after.
- 12 · Decision path — who signs, and by when. A quote that waits three weeks for a signature is a quote for a different, rushed project.