by Robert Dunsmore, Freelance Creative Director
So EXPERIENCEit2025, an exhibition in a bar works. “2 days of inspiration, connections, and mild chaos” said one report going on to add “the real magic was in the people”.
Nobody ever said that about an exhibition, till now.
Last week saw 200 odd delegates and 50 exhibitors at the leading Edinburgh bar Brewhemia and it was up close and personal and unleashed the power of engagement. The behaviour altering bar-cafe setting changed the pace of everything.
The magic really was in the people. The setting rendered an immediate feeling of familiarity, of belonging, delegates came in an got straight down to business. More energy, more connection, more business.
Sure, it was in a bar, but it was still a trade show-and-tell. Except it was more of a story-and-tell. EXPERIENCEit2025 had no exhibition stands, just boxes, cabinets of curiosity, tabletop wonder-room-bureaux of belonging. Each, a story to belong to, a story to be unboxed each time for each delegate visit. I saw branded-tech-tarot cards, a Lego chessboard, a cute branded escape room-box made out of a hotel safe to un-box a story of products and services.
Unboxing is peak now and EXPERIENCEit2025 got this.
A massive phenomenon that gained popularity around the mid-2000s showcasing the unpacking of new products, and EXPERIENCEit2025 brought digital into real life. Unboxing is where we live now. 25 billion views on you tube a year, over 90,000 monthly searches of the 20 million available “unboxing” results. One in five of us have watched an unboxing video some of which exceed 10 million views.
We are box curious.
Unboxing, or revealing knowledge and experience via cabinets of curiosity has long been the start of something big, something of wonder. It might have been peak 17th century, but a hundred years later cabinets of wonder to whole wonder rooms collections had burst out of the box to evolve into cultural collections we now know such as our British Museum, that kind of set the stall for an event and now and experience economy.
Thing is, because EXPERIENCEit2025 did not have 50 exhibition spaces, it made a more human-to human space. Each unboxing had space to breathe, space to share an experience. I might not have been an exhibitor, but as a creative couldn’t resist joining in loading rolled up sketch ideas into a vintage cigarette case – “pick an idea”.
Less build, more story, leveraging authenticity, relatability and transparency, taking connection, energy and intensity to another level. Brewhemia is a pretty big bar so that left headspace to use their upper level hosted by Song Division for everything in performance from expresso Ted Talks to the now obligatory (it’s fun) group-disco-yoga.
Oh, and did I mention, it was in a bar.
