Today I visited the Spring Fair at the NEC in Birmingham. It is a great trade fair to visit as there are many exhibitors and lots to see. In particular, I enjoyed visiting the Home section in Hall 1 as it gave me a lot of inspiration for where to source products and materials in the future. One of the things that really surprised me is that all of the amazing products were not as expensive as I thought they would be, probably due to the trade only prices.

There were many companies exhibiting there that I was inspired by and would use in the future when I am able to have a trade account with them. I had the opportunity to talk to some of the exhibitors and ask them a few questions about their business which I will talk about in some future blog entries on the individual companies so that I can really talk about them in detail.

Photography is at each exhibitors’ discretion, some of the exhibitors allowed me to take photographs of their stand and parts of the fair in the Home Section of Hall 1. Additionally, some of the exhibitors have given me permission to add a blog entry about their company showing photographs of their designs. I will show each company that gave me permission to take photographs in further posts.

Although I would mainly like to go into commercial hospitality design, a lot of the exhibitions were really relevant to what I would like to do as many of their products could be used in hotels, restaurants and bars. Additionally, it has given me some inspiration for a project that I am working on at the moment.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Spring Fair and I will be signing up for the Autumn Fair as I think that it is important to keep up to date on the latest products and trends in interior design.