Taking It On the Road: Mohawk Finds a Safe Way to Showcase its New Products
Here’s a conundrum. Imagine you’ve got important new products to launch and that all the tradeshows you typically use to launch them are cancelled or postponed thanks to COVID. On top of that, your customers have told you that an online launch just won’t cut it. They want to see and touch your products in-person. Yet COVID makes traditional in-person events risky. What do you do?
Well, that’s the challenge Mohawk, the world’s biggest flooring company, is facing now. The first few months of each year are the time flooring companies traditionally show floor store owners and their salespeople everything new for the upcoming Spring selling season. Yet all the shows during those months – including the gigantic Surfaces show usually scheduled for late January in Vegas – are cancelled or postponed to later in the year.
Can’t Mohawk just wait till later? Not a happy thought when you have hundreds of new colors and patterns for multiple brands and product types to launch – and at a time when home remodeling is going gangbusters as quarantined folks learn just how important home is.
So, here’s what Mohawk decided to do.
With our help, they created the Mohawk Momentum traveling road show, a carefully designed visitor experience that moves from city to city and venue to venue. It takes Mohawk’s flooring retail customers on a journey highlighting the extraordinary investments Mohawk is making to help move their businesses forward. And it tells its many stories through a mix of fun, immersive artwork, exhibits and interactives.
What about safety? That’s the first and most important consideration – making everybody safe and making sure they know it, so they’re confident coming. In fact, safety was the driver behind the idea of a traveling road show in the first place. By taking the show to the customers, no one has to fly or stay in a hotel. They can drive in and out in a day. And by limiting attendance to invited Mohawk customers only, letting them into the space in small, timed groups and spacing the exhibits out across a big, open space, no one is ever crowded.
Beyond the design of the experience itself, there are all the usual safety precautions – health screens, temperature checks, sanitation stations, and disinfecting crews. The combination of all these things works. As one flooring store owner who attended the Dallas event said, “Mohawk is taking a ton of precautions…and nobody was climbing on top of you to get to the same display. At no point did I feel unsafe.”
As of this writing, Mohawk is halfway through its five-city tour. And so far, attendance and customer excitement has been beyond expectations – a clear reflection of pent up demand for a safe chance to network and see what’s new. Another attendee summarized it like this, “We’ve attended virtual events, but I don’t feel they have any value. I like to do things in person. I like to see the products and have the dialogue.”
The photos here come from from the Atlanta and Dallas tour stops. For a cool digital tour of the Dallas experience, check out this link designed for people unable to attend any of the events. And stay tuned for more as we wrap up the next couple of stops — ending in Huntington Beach, CA in early March.