Automechanika Riyadh 2027 stand: the brake pad in the plastic bag

By Joby Thuruthel, Creative Technologist, FAIM Digital W.L.L

He wanted a video wall. Nine metres of it, if the budget allowed.

It was the first week of September. The son of a family parts importer in Dammam rang us from his car with the air conditioning roaring, because a friend in Manama had told him to. His father had built the business on brake pads and filters. The son now had space booked at Automechanika Riyadh 2027, and he wanted a stand that stopped looking like a shelf.

We asked what had happened at his last show.

He laughed, without much enjoying it. His sales team had carried tablets with the catalogue on them, and the catalogue lived online. By mid morning on the first day the tablets were spinning. His best salesman ended up thumbing through a printed price list from the year before while a fleet buyer checked his phone and drifted away.

A nine metre wall would have looked very good from the aisle. It would have done nothing for that fleet buyer, who only wanted to know whether a pad fits his vans.

We drove over the causeway the following week.

A stand for people with black fingernails

The warehouse smelled of rubber and cardboard, and the humidity met us at the door. We spent the morning at the trade counter, which taught us more than the brief had.

A workshop owner walked in, put a worn filter on the counter and said nothing. The storeman had been running that counter since before the son was born. He picked the filter up, turned it over once and went to the right shelf.

Nobody in that building read anything first. They handled the part.

The organiser describes its audience as importers, wholesalers, workshop owners, fleet managers and procurement leaders. A good share of those people will shake your hand with fingers that have spent a working life around grease. A glossy touchscreen would be smeared by noon, and we have written before about what glare does to one that is already dirty.

So we drew a steel plinth, waist high, with a shallow recess in the top. Each sample pad on the stand carries a small tag on its back. Set one down and a thin amber ring wakes around the recess. On the screen behind it, that exact pad opens slowly in the dark, backing plate, shim and friction material drifting apart like a watch being taken to pieces. Fitment sits underneath in Arabic and English.

He stopped mentioning the nine metres after that.

A new hall and an awkward word about prices

The next risk sat in the floor plan. This edition moves from the old convention centre to Riyadh Front Exhibition & Conference Center. Everything his team knew about shows in Riyadh, down to where the power came up and how long the crates took to reach the stand, belonged to a different building.

We asked for the hall drawing and the exhibitor manual from the organiser’s portal, and for the name of whoever signed off electrical orders. He had none of them yet. That is fine in September. It stops being fine in late December.

His sales director had a request of his own. He wanted trade prices on the big screen, since buyers always ask.

We talked him out of it. Two wholesalers from the same street can end up shoulder to shoulder at that plinth, and his prices moved with volume. Prices went to the rep’s tablet instead. A visitor’s details went in only after a tick box, in both languages, saying plainly what the company would do with them. The lead capture ran on the same local system as everything else.

He grumbled for a day. Then he admitted he had once watched a rival photograph his price list at a show.

The rehearsal in bay three

We do not trust a build that has only lived in a studio. So in the last week of October we set the whole thing up in a service bay at his workshop, tyres stacked along one wall and a compressor in the corner, and asked the mechanics to come and use it.

We had cut the internet before anyone arrived and told nobody. That was the easy test. The films and fitment data sat on a machine under the plinth with that morning’s stock list, because our builds are offline-first. The stock list wore a small line saying when it was last refreshed, since a number that only looks live is worse than no number at all.

Then the compressor kicked in.

The lights dipped and the screen went black. Same circuit. Every mechanic in the bay turned round and looked at us.

The system came back by itself and landed on the pad it had been showing, which is what automatic recovery is for. It still felt far too long. At a show with live demonstrations you do not know what your neighbour will plug in, so we added a small battery unit under the plinth and put a separate supply on the power order. The compressor had also swallowed the film’s narration whole. We dropped the voiceover that afternoon and moved the story into captions.

A young mechanic was reading the Arabic side aloud when he started to laugh. The part number was backwards.

On the English screen it read 2291-40-BK. In the Arabic sentence it came out as BK-40-2291. Software treats a hyphen as having no direction of its own, so a code dropped into a right to left sentence can reorder itself without showing any error. A wholesaler who orders by number would have ordered the wrong part, or quietly stopped believing the screen. Locking every part number left to right took minutes. Spotting it took a man who reads Arabic and knows what a part number looks like.

The storeman had stood at the back all this time with his hands behind him.

When the others had finished he walked out of the bay. He came back with a plastic bag and tipped an old brake pad on to the clean steel. It was worn nearly flat. Black dust went everywhere.

Nothing happened. No tag, so no ring and no film. The screen carried on looping as if he were not there.

Nobody spoke. He looked at the son, then at us, and lifted one shoulder.

He had no need to explain. We had built a stand around our pads, and the people he had served for thirty years bring their own. They would do exactly this in Riyadh, in front of the whole aisle.

The second way in

By the following Sunday the plinth had one. A rep beside it asks for the number stamped on the old part, or simply the vehicle, and keys it into a handheld. The screen finds the replacement and the ring comes up as usual. Typing brought one last surprise, since an Arabic keyboard can send Eastern Arabic digits that a search built on Western ones never matches. It reads both now.

There is also a folded cloth on a hook at the side of the plinth. A mechanic will wipe the steel himself if you give him something to do it with.

The son came back that week and put the storeman’s pad in the recess. The rep keyed in the number. The amber ring rose, and in the dark of the bay the new pad opened layer by layer, far cleaner than the thing sitting on the steel.

The storeman nodded once and went back to his counter.

The crates go to Riyadh in January, with our spares and one of our team, who will commission the stand and stay beside it for all three days. The old pad goes too, still in its bag.

This story is a composite drawn from common situations at exhibitions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, not a single client project.

Planning your Automechanika Riyadh 2027 stand

Automechanika Riyadh 2027 runs from 11 to 13 January at Riyadh Front Exhibition & Conference Center, after the May 2026 edition was postponed. The organiser expects more than 500 exhibitors and over 19,000 visitors. Our interactive stand builds typically take four to six weeks, with a minimum of five to ten working days, so count back from your build-up date and not from opening day.

1. This weekGet the paperworkHall drawing, exhibitor manual, build-up times and power order deadlines.
2. End of NovemberApprove the ideaA later start is possible, but it costs you the rehearsal.
3. Mid DecemberArabic in the live systemA native reader checks real part numbers on the real screen.
4. Before the crates leaveRehearse somewhere roughNo internet, a heavy load on the circuit, real hands and real parts.
5. 11 January 2027Doors openYour supplier should be on the stand, with spares.

Buyer checklist

• Have you read the manual for the new venue, instead of relying on notes from the old one?
• What still works on the stand with the internet off?
• What happens to every screen when a neighbour’s machine dips the power?
• Can a visitor with greasy hands use it, and what happens when he brings his own part?
• Has someone who reads Arabic checked part numbers and digits in the live system?
• Are trade prices kept off any screen a competitor can see?
• Do visitors agree, in their own language, before their details are stored?
• Who from your supplier stands by the build for all three days, and what spares do they carry?

Related reading: stand ideas that stop visitors walking past, showing a product you cannot ship and driving every display from one content panel.