UPM Group built a fully 3D printed exhibition stand for EuroShop 2026, the retail industry’s largest international trade fair, held in Düsseldorf, Germany. The roughly 100 m² installation combined 3D printed architectural structures with custom furniture pieces, all produced additively.
The stand was manufactured through a joint effort between UPM Group’s production sites in Modena, Italy, and London, UK, both running WASP large-format 3D printing equipment. Splitting the work across the two facilities let the companies scale up capacity and manage logistics for a project with a tight production window: the process ran from prototyping to finished components in about six weeks.
Production process
Components were 3D printed with KUKA robotic arms fitted with WASP’s HDP XL and HDP XXL pellet extruders, a setup built for large structural parts. The team used UV-stabilized PETG-GF 20%, a glass fiber-reinforced material certified as flame-retardant by material supplier FormFutura, chosen for its suitability in exhibition and retail fit-out settings.
Design and functional integration
The stand’s design, led by architect Christopher G. Ward, aimed for organic, continuous forms that could house the booth’s functional systems without breaking up the visual design. Signage and LED walls were recessed directly into the printed walls rather than mounted separately, along with other technical systems.
Beyond the architectural shell, the project included printed furniture including sofas, stools, and a suspended Möbius strip installation worked into the stand’s truss structure, alongside additional printed decorative elements matched to the rest of the build.
Large-format printing speeds up exhibition builds
UPM Group’s approach reflects a broader shift in how exhibition fabricators are using large-scale AM to solve a timing problem: trade show stands need complex, one-off geometries built fast, then shipped and assembled on a fixed deadline. Splitting production between two WASP-equipped facilities in Modena and London let UPM Group treat robotic 3D printing as a distributed manufacturing line rather than a single bottleneck, compressing a custom 100 m² build into roughly six weeks.
Similar deadline pressure has pushed other fabricators toward the same WASP hardware UPM Group relied on for its EuroShop stand. Zaha Hadid Architects‘ Tech Lab used a WASP HDP XL extruder to print a six-meter air traffic control tower for its stand at Passenger Terminal Expo 2026 in London, 3D printing fifteen modular panels in fire-resistant PETG over a continuous 270-hour run and embedding LED lighting directly into the structure.
A similar approach shaped an earlier Düsseldorf trade show booth: Trindo GmbH built the world’s first fully 3D printed exhibition booth out of sand-based material for the city’s Viscom show, working with the Clormann Design Team to fold eight illuminated displays and a set of wall modules directly into the printed structure, then assembling and dismantling the booth on-site.
Across exhibition projects, the pattern UPM Group’s build follows is becoming more common: large-format AM compresses design, fabrication, and installation into a single deadline-driven workflow.
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Featured image via 3D printed exhibition booth UPM Group Euroshop 2026. Photo via UPM Group.
