Ship the machine. Leave the stand to us.
Custom exhibition stands for IMTS, RSNA, FABTECH and every McCormick Place show — fabricated in the US and delivered on one fixed USD price signed before work starts. Your product may have to cross the ocean. Your stand doesn’t, and neither does a single customs form for it. No US entity required.
Filters the stands below — each shows its Chicago price.
Chicago’s flagship shows are inspection events — machinists at IMTS and radiologists at RSNA spend their working lives judging tolerances, and they extend the habit to your walls. Everything below came out of our own shop: designed, fabricated, printed and wired by one team, then stood up complete and photographed before shipping. What you approve from abroad is what lands on the floor.
Teramind
1,800 sq ft island with interactive demo zones.
Radware
Hands-on learning stations inside a four-sided island.
Appdome
Security demo theatre built for high-volume technical traffic.
SpyCloud
Interactive stations arranged for one-to-one conversation.
Fulcrum GT
Full-height LED as the structure, not an add-on to it.
WillowTree
Meeting-led layout with enclosed rooms off an open front.
IMAX
Large-format island built around a screening experience.
Microsoft
Modular island scaled across a multi-show programme.
Also built for Genea, Dunnhumby, Chili Piper, LHH, Calm and Spekit.
Chicago’s biggest shows are product-heavy. A machine-tool builder at IMTS or an imaging company at RSNA has no choice about international freight — the product itself has to cross, clear customs, and be rigged into place. What’s optional is sending the stand along with it: walls, counters, ceilings and lightboxes that double the crate count, the carnet schedule, and the weight the material handlers bill on.
Split the freight instead. The machine travels — that budget was always spoken for. The environment around it gets built on this side: your design language, US materials, US electrical code, and a fixed USD price that covers everything from renders to dismantle.
The product clears on its own paperwork, sized to what actually must cross. The stand never appears on a carnet schedule, a duty calculation, or a broker’s invoice.
Material handling in Chicago bills by weight, and stand structure is heavy freight. Built locally, the stand ships domestic and light — and we forecast the whole line against your build before you sign.
Send the machine’s footprint, service clearances and power draw with your brief. The stand gets engineered around it — sight lines to the demo, safety setbacks, cable routes — instead of adapted to it on the floor.
Stand electrics built to US specification pass the floor inspection as a formality — no adapters, no rework order at show-site rates, no inspector standing between you and opening day.
McCormick Place runs the most formal show-floor system in the country — and for exhibitors from regions where you hire a van and build your own stand, it’s the deepest end of the pool to start in. The terms below decide budgets and schedules here. Learn them from a paragraph, not from an invoice.
Trucks don’t drive to the dock — they check in at a marshalling yard and get called forward in sequence. A driver who doesn’t know the system loses hours; a load that misses its call loses its slot. Our carriers run this routine every cycle, so your freight arrives when the schedule says it will.
Carpentry, electrical and rigging at McCormick belong to specific unions with defined jurisdictions, and reforms have only modestly widened what exhibitors may do themselves. Our fixed price carries the right crews for each task — you never map a jurisdiction or sign a labour order.
The fee for moving freight between dock and stand space, billed by weight. Nobody can waive it and no honest vendor “includes” it — but it can be forecast to the dollar against your actual freight, and filed at advance rates. We do both before you commit.
The big Chicago shows assign freight windows by hall zone weeks in advance, and off-target arrivals pay surcharges. Your date sits in the exhibitor manual; we plan fabrication, trucking and crew calls backwards from it.
The fitted walls and fascia that come with space in Europe or Asia don’t exist here. A US inline space arrives as carpet and curtain at most; the entire visible stand is yours to bring — or to have built on this side of the ocean.
US floor plans sell in feet: a 3×3 m is roughly a 10×10, a 6×6 m a 20×20. The pricing table below carries both units — quote your space in whichever your contract uses.
Fixed and all-inclusive for custom exhibition stands in Chicago, invoiced in USD to your home-country entity — international wire or card, no US bank account or address required. Chicago’s labour market is priced into these figures from the start, which is exactly the point: the number you approve is the number you pay.
| Footprint | Metric | Fixed price (USD) | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10×10 | ≈ 3×3 m · 9 m² | $14,000 – $16,000 | Inline. First US market entry, lead capture. |
| 10×20 | ≈ 3×6 m · 18 m² | $20,500 – $25,500 | Inline. Demo plus seated conversation. |
| 20×20 | ≈ 6×6 m · 37 m² | $32,000 – $37,000 | Island. Two or three zones, four-sided. |
| 20×30 | ≈ 6×9 m · 56 m² | $34,500 – $40,000 | Island. Adds a semi-private meeting space. |
| 20×40 | ≈ 6×12 m · 74 m² | $40,000 – $51,500 | Island. Machine display plus meeting zone. |
| 20×50 | ≈ 6×15 m · 93 m² | $46,000 – $57,500 | Island. Long-run product wall. |
| 30×30 | ≈ 9×9 m · 84 m² | $46,000 – $57,500 | Island. Enclosed meeting room, theatre seating. |
| 30×40 | ≈ 9×12 m · 111 m² | $63,000 – $75,000 | Island. Flagship, double-deck capable. |
The venue invoices these directly to every exhibitor, whichever exhibit company builds the stand — no vendor anywhere can legitimately “include” them. We estimate each line against your actual stand and freight before you commit, then file the orders inside the advance-rate window.
An IMTS exhibitor shipping a machine tool from Europe pays the machine’s freight either way — that’s the cost of showing the product. The question is everything packed around it. A 6×12 m stand sent along for the ride adds its own crates, its own carnet lines, its own weight on the drayage scale, and its own risk. The same project, run both ways:
In both scenarios: the machine’s freight, its customs entry, its drayage and its rigging into position — the unavoidable cost of exhibiting the product, and we coordinate its arrival alongside the stand build either way. The difference is whether the stand added a second set of every one of those lines.
Every logistics dollar you don’t spend on walls is a dollar of stand. The left column buys crates on a ship; the right column buys the environment your machine deserves to be seen in.
Live inventory below, each card carrying its Chicago price. Choose a footprint or budget in the finder above and the selection re-sorts right here — every structure finishable as a fully custom exhibition stand.
12 booths · Chicago, Illinois pricing
McCormick Place is the largest convention centre in North America — four connected buildings on the lakefront, each with its own halls, docks and freight rhythm. From a floor plan PDF in another hemisphere, “McCormick Place” looks like one address. Operationally, North, South, East (Lakeside Center) and West are different destinations, and the hall letter on your space contract is the first fact we plan from.
The core of the giant industrial shows, with heavy-freight docks built for machinery. Long dock-to-space hauls make the marshalling call time decisive — a slot missed here echoes through the whole install sequence.
The newest building, carrying a steady rotation of national congresses and mid-size expos. Different docks, different rules of thumb — a plan copied from a South Building project doesn’t transfer, so we don’t copy it.
The lakefront original, still hosting shows and overflow halls for the biggest weeks. Older infrastructure means earlier coordination on rigging and utilities — the kind of detail the exhibitor manual buries on page sixty and we surface in week one.
Chicago’s winter is a planning fact, not a footnote. For RSNA and other cold-season shows, we build weather margin into the freight schedule and hold the pre-build photo gate earlier — so a December storm costs the plan a buffer, not the stand.
IMTS gathers the global machine-tool industry every second September; RSNA brings tens of thousands of radiology professionals from around the world every winter. For an international exhibitor these are the opposite of a US market test — your existing customers, competitors and distributors are all in the building, and the stand is judged against the best your industry brings anywhere.
That shapes the brief. These floors reward stands engineered around a working exhibit — clear sight lines to a live demo, safety setbacks that don’t strangle traffic, power and data planned before the floor plan is filed — and a meeting layer on top, because the visitors who matter arrive with appointments. Design for the demo and the deal at once; everything else is decoration.
Footprint, service clearances, power draw and floor loading go into the design brief on day one, so the stand frames the machine instead of fighting it.
Semi-enclosed rooms with real acoustic value, storage that swallows crates and coats, and a hosting point that can pour coffee for a delegation between demos.
Your visitors saw your stand in Hannover or Düsseldorf. The Chicago build carries the same design language at the same finish level — verified in photographs before it ships.
Your US calendar runs past Chicago? Las Vegas, Orlando, New York and fifty more cities run on the same published fixed model — one stand design, one project manager, every city’s price known before your show year starts.
“They never just build the booth and disappear — I always know I have someone on call and ready to jump in when the unexpected inevitably happens. That level of responsiveness makes a huge difference in high-pressure event environments.”
“I’ve worked with Pure Exhibits for almost a year now, and have had such a great experience! They are our go-to for trade shows, and create memorable booths that represent our brand well. The team is incredibly responsive and reliable.”
“It’s always a pleasure to work with Utsav. The process is simple, straightforward, and high quality. I have worked with them for 3 years now and will continue!”
“Their team is incredibly flexible throughout the design process and truly collaborative in bringing ideas to life. I highly recommend Pure Exhibits to anyone looking for a reliable, thoughtful, and experienced exhibit partner.”
Chicago’s fixed points, with the planning runway each realistically needs from your first email. Several run on alternating years — a detail that catches teams planning a multi-year US programme from abroad, so we’ve marked it. Around these, McCormick’s four buildings carry rotating congresses all year; name yours and we’ll pull its manual before we quote.
| Show | Typical month | Venue | Start planning |
|---|---|---|---|
| IMTS (even years) | September | McCormick Place | 6 months |
| RSNA | Nov – Dec | McCormick Place | 5 months |
| National Restaurant Association Show | May | McCormick Place | 4 months |
| PACK EXPO International (even years) | Oct – Nov | McCormick Place | 5 months |
| FABTECH (rotates to Chicago) | Autumn | McCormick Place | 5 months |
| The Inspired Home Show | March | McCormick Place | 4 months |
IMTS gets six months — machine-heavy stands carry engineering, floor-loading checks and power coordination on top of the normal approvals, and the every-second-year rhythm means the whole industry files into the same services window at once.
Show dates don’t create cost pressure — order deadlines do, and the decisive one closes roughly eight weeks out, when advance rates on electrical, rigging and drayage expire. For a team coordinating a machine shipment and a stand build from another continent, the whole project exists to arrive at that gate with both freight streams already scheduled.
A vendor collapse, a space that opened late, a stand crate held at a port while the machine sailed on — international projects fail in pieces, and the stand is the piece that can be rebuilt on this side in weeks. With design, fabrication and print in one building, approval-to-floor runs about four weeks. Same quality gate — built and photographed before shipping — same published price.
Tell us the show, your space size — metres or feet — and what you’re exhibiting. Within 24 hours: design concepts, one fixed USD figure, and the venue’s own charges forecast beside it. The machine crosses; everything else gets built here.
Or call us directly — (800) 379-8451
