Planning a booth for a Chicago trade show? Booth Fabricators designs and fabricates custom trade show exhibits for exhibitors heading to McCormick Place and other Chicago-area venues. Our in-house team handles exhibit design, fabrication, graphics and installation coordination from brief to handover. Start with a free 3D design consultation and see your booth before a single panel is cut.
Exhibiting in Chicago means coordinating design, fabrication, freight, and on-site labor across a venue that runs on strict union jurisdictions and exhibitor-manual deadlines. Booth Fabricators manages that coordination end-to-end: custom exhibit design, modular and rental displays, graphics printing & installation, AV integration, and fabrication happen in-house, while logistics & booth installation at the show are coordinated with your event's official service contractor and locally engaged labor — so your booth is ready when the doors open and cleared out on schedule when they close.
Leading brands trust us for custom exhibition booth design, fabrication, and complete on-site execution.
From compact rental booths to premium custom-built stands, our team designs, fabricates, ships, installs, and hands over exhibition spaces that look sharp on the floor and work hard for your brand.
Whether you need a 10x10 inline or a full island exhibit, our team builds the display and manages the parts of the process that trip up first-time McCormick Place exhibitors.
Bespoke trade show booth design Chicago exhibitors can brief once and approve through our 3D design & visualization process, built around your product, visitor flow, and booth footprint.
In-house carpentry, metalwork and finishing support complete exhibit fabrication for custom trade show display Chicago projects, from small inline booths to complex structures.
Chicago trade show displays for exhibitors who need a strong presence without a full custom build: backlit walls, modular kits and portable systems.
Our exhibit rentals give Chicago exhibitors a fully branded and professionally finished option for a single show or a multi-city season.
Our double-decker exhibits support larger footprints for shows like IMTS or PACK EXPO International, including two-story structures where hall ceiling height and rigging plans allow it.
Coordinated with your show's official service contractor and locally engaged labor, following your exhibitor manual's move-in and move-out windows.
How we work: Brief → 3D Design → Technical Drawings → Production → Logistics → Installation → Inspection → Handover → Dismantling. Every stage is documented and shared before the next one starts, so nothing changes on you mid-build.
We're transparent about where our track record currently stands: Booth Fabricators has not yet delivered a McCormick Place project, and we won't claim otherwise. What we do bring is verified U.S. trade show experience and deep, sourced knowledge of how McCormick Place actually operates.
Our Portfolio includes U.S. shows such as a 28 sqm booth for Doggo Paradiso at SUPERZOO 2026 in Las Vegas and a 110 sqm exhibit for House of Botswana at the JCK Show 2026, also in Las Vegas — real projects with real dimensions, not McCormick Place work, and we're not presenting them as such. Design and core fabrication for these projects were completed in-house, with on-site installation coordinated through approved local partners, the same model we'd apply to a Chicago show.
For McCormick Place specifically, our preparation work centers on the venue's own documentation: exhibitor manuals, Official Service Contractor guidelines, and union labor jurisdictions (see Section 7). That's the groundwork every exhibitor needs regardless of who builds their booth, and it's where we start every Chicago quote.
McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America, with 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space across four buildings — the North, South and West Buildings and the Lakeside Center — including 1.2 million square feet on a single level. The campus also holds more than 170 meeting rooms totaling roughly 600,000 square feet of meeting space, six ballrooms, and ceiling heights up to 50 feet in the exhibit halls, which matters for hanging signs and trusses on larger island exhibits. The venue draws close to 3 million visitors a year and hosts some of the country's largest recurring trade shows, including IMTS (September 14–19, 2026), PACK EXPO International (October 18–21, 2026), RSNA's Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting (November 29–December 3, 2026, with technical exhibits running through December 2), and The Inspired Home Show (March 9–11, 2027).
Every one of those shows runs on rules set by its own show organizer, not by a single blanket McCormick Place policy. Height limits, rigging permissions, electrical drops, fire-marshal requirements, and labor jurisdictions are defined hall by hall and event by event in that show's exhibitor manual — this is why we ask for your specific hall assignment and manual before quoting, rather than reusing a generic Chicago booth spec.
A few things stay consistent across McCormick Place shows: exhibit hall labor — carpenters, electricians, riggers, decorators, and material handling — is performed by union trades hired through your show's Official Service Contractor (OSC), the general contractor your show organizer appoints. Exhibitors can also work through an Exhibitor Appointed Contractor (EAC) for design and supervision, provided that contractor is properly registered with the OSC and carries a Certificate of Insurance meeting the show's requirements. ADA accessibility, fire-retardant material standards, and freight/material handling documentation are typically spelled out in the same manual. We do not hold Official Service Contractor or approved-contractor status at McCormick Place, and we don't imply otherwise — we work within whatever OSC and labor structure your specific show requires.
Feedback from brands we have supported with exhibition stand design, fabrication and on-site execution.
Defence products are tricky - buyers want demos but also private talks. Booth Fabricators built a separate meeting corner away from the display floor. At Eurosatory, we had more serious buyer conversations in three days than at any past show we've done.
People don't buy a massage chair without sitting in it first. Booth Fabricators kept our demo zone open so visitors could try three or four chairs without bumping into each other, while our staff could still talk to them right there.
Twenty square meters isn't much for a full snack range. Booth Fabricators used tiered shelving so our dry-fruit products stayed visible, not stacked up, and still fit a small buyer table without visitors feeling boxed in.
TTK Prestige had cookware, cooktops, and appliances like our NutriJet range to show at IITF - all needing different display heights. Booth Fabricators zoned each category separately and finished a day early, so we weren't still setting up cookers on opening morning.
Before REI Show, we'd only seen the 3D design on a screen and honestly weren't sure how much of it would actually show up on the floor. But the booth we walked into matched it almost exactly - same seating corner, same layout for the inverters. That kind of accuracy matters when you're short on setup time.
Honestly our first worry was that the collection would look cramped - garments need breathing room or they just look like stock. Booth Fabricators pushed the racks slightly apart, added proper lighting on each section, and kept one corner free just for sitting with buyers. Nothing about it felt like a typical trade show setup.
We almost skipped this show because four days felt too tight to pull off a proper booth. Called Booth Fabricators anyway, expecting a compromise somewhere - branding, finishing, something. Nothing was cut. We walked into a stand that looked like we'd planned it for weeks.
IITF gets general public, not just trade buyers, so people actually want to sit in the chairs and feel the massagers work before they trust the price tag. Booth Fabricators kept enough open floor for that kind of hands-on trial without the stand turning into a queue.
McCormick Place, Chicago, IL — the North and South Buildings are addressed at 2301 S. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive; the West Building at 2301 S. Indiana Ave; and the Lakeside Center at 2301 S. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
The CTA Green Line's Cermak-McCormick Place station sits about 0.15 miles from the West Building, and the CTA #3 King Drive and #21 Cermak buses stop directly on campus. A Metra Electric station inside the South Building's Grand Concourse runs roughly seven minutes from downtown's Millennium Station.
The campus has three main parking lots — A, B and C — all ADA-accessible and within walking distance of the halls, with roughly 5,800 parking spaces across the campus. Lot A serves North, South and West Building events; Lot C serves Lakeside Center and Arie Crown Theater events.
Each show's exhibitor manual specifies dock assignments and material-handling procedures through the appointed Official Service Contractor — confirm your specific loading window and dock with your show organizer before shipping.
Tell us your exhibition name, venue, booth dimensions, floor plan, number of open sides, and design requirements, then submit your Free 3D design request — we'll get back with a proposal.
Quick answers to the most common questions about our exhibition stand design and fabrication services.
