What's Working at IBS & KBIS: Nine Exhibit Trends Worth Watching

Walk the floor at IBS and KBIS, and you're not just looking at building products — you're looking at a live laboratory for trade show exhibit design. With more than 2,250 exhibiting brands spread across 1.2 million net square feet, the combined shows are big enough and competitive enough to surface the strategies that actually move the needle and expose the ones that don't. Here are nine trends worth paying attention to, both at IBS and across the broader Design & Construction Week landscape.

The Demo Is the Exhibit

If there's one trend that defines the IBS show floor above all others, it's this: The demo has moved from a supporting element to the main attraction. Packed aisles, busy booths, and loud demonstrations were seen and heard throughout the Orange County Convention Center at IBS 2026. That last word — loud — is telling. Demonstrations at IBS aren't polished presentations for a passive audience. They're working, noisy, hands-on proof points.

Simpson Strong-Tie featured its core engineered structural connectors and building solutions at Booth W3201 in the Central Hall, where visitors could demo the EasyFrame automated marking system EasyCut saw along with digital residential software. The saw drew crowds not because it was displayed attractively, but because it was running — cutting, printing, and demonstrating performance in real time. That's a significant shift from the static product-on-a-pedestal model that still dominates too many trade show booths. At IBS, if your product does something, you'd better be showing it doing that thing.

The broader trade show industry is catching up. At CES, Samsung and LG have long understood that a working demonstration outperforms a rendered animation every time. But when it comes to demos, the building industry is setting the pace.

The Booth-as-Showroom Has Become the Standard

If there's a single defining shift in KBIS exhibit design over the past several years, it's the near-complete migration away from product-on-a-pedestal displays toward fully realized rooms and lifestyle environments. At KBIS 2026, showrooms and model homes garnered the most attention, and some were so well done that they took visitors entirely out of the trade show environment. That last part is the goal: a booth that makes you forget you're standing in a convention center.

Kohler — winner of the KBIS Best in Show Booth Award for the fourth consecutive year — delivered an immersive experience no matter which entrance attendees encountered. One end featured cascading fountains and bubbling bathtubs, while the other invited passersby to "Step into Possibility" through a tunnel with a digital floor projecting moving water. Inside, vignettes took attendees through different lifestyle rooms, ranging from sauna-inspired showers to a mahogany kitchen to a bathroom with a teal toilet, bathtub, and sinks against salmon-colored tile — one of the floor's most popular photo spots.

Fabuwood's booth featured vignettes by Pulp Design Studios, Claire Staszak, and Nikki Levy, while Antolini displayed its stone in an innovative, immersive village-style booth designed by the brand's creative lead, Alessandro La Spada. The throughline across all of these: products shown in context, doing what they do in an actual home rather than hanging on a wall. The question to ask yourself before KBIS 2027 is not "How should we display our products?" but rather "What room do we want people to walk into?"

The Umbrella Booth

One of the more significant strategic shifts happening at IBS is the move away from fragmented, brand-by-brand exhibiting toward a unified umbrella presence that showcases an entire portfolio under a single roof. The argument is both economic and experiential. Instead of dividing a budget among multiple smaller booths that compete with each other for foot traffic, a parent company consolidates its resources into one commanding, well-funded exhibit that tells a bigger story.

Westlake Royal Building Products exhibited its diverse portfolio of industry-leading brands — including Royal and Exterior Portfolio vinyl siding lines, TruExterior poly-ash siding, Celect Cellular Composite Siding, Cedar Renditions aluminum siding, Unified Steel Stone Coated Roofing, US Tile Clay Roofing Products, DaVinci Roofscapes, Eldorado Stone, Cultured Stone, Dutch Quality Stone, Mid-America Shutters, and more — all within an approximately 5,000-square-foot booth at IBS 2026. The exhibit didn't just display those brands. It unified them under a single design language and a single strategic narrative.

The effect is powerful. Visitors who might have wandered past a modest, category-specific booth instead find themselves inside a comprehensive brand ecosystem. The umbrella approach also reinforces the parent company's authority — it signals scale, breadth, and the kind of integrated solution-selling that resonates with builders who want fewer vendor relationships, not more.

Similarly, partnerships between kitchen and bath manufacturers and complementary brands in adjacent categories allow both partners to show their products in a more complete, realistic context than either could achieve alone.

The Dacor booth partnered with Artistic Tile to create a curved mosaic wall with an integrated refrigerator, showcasing Dacor's panel-ready capabilities and push-to-open design in a way that pushed boundaries and inspired designers to rethink what was possible. Kohler's exhibit was outfitted with help from Benjamin Moore, Cosentino, GE Monogram and Café, and FreePower — a collaboration that allowed each brand's products to be shown in a fully realized environment rather than in isolation.

For mid-size KBIS exhibitors who can't match the square footage of a Kohler or Samsung, this is arguably the most actionable takeaway from 2026. A strategic collaboration with a non-competing brand in an adjacent category can expand what your booth communicates, reduce the cost of building a complete environment, and introduce your products to a different segment of the KBIS audience — all at the same time. The best collaborative booths at KBIS don't read as co-exhibits. They read as one coherent design statement.

Trend Forecasting as Strategy

A growing number of IBS exhibitors are positioning themselves not just as product suppliers but as industry authorities, using their booth space to deliver market intelligence and design forecasting alongside product displays. This transforms the exhibit from a transaction environment into a thought-leadership platform.

The payoff is measurable. Visitors who come to a booth for insight, not just product specs, spend more time there, have higher-quality conversations with sales staff, and leave with a stronger perception of the brand. That's a smart exhibit strategy. The trend content creates the need, and the product display satisfies it.

Conversely, one of the more surprising findings from KBIS 2026 is how effectively brand legacy — properly executed — cut through a show floor dominated by technology and newness. Kohler didn't open its 15,600-square-foot exhibit with its latest product launches. It opened with history. The curated journey began through a replica of the historic Wisconsin foundry gate set against a cream city brick façade — a tribute to Kohler's cast iron legacy and the craftsmanship that has defined the brand since 1873. Kohler Cast Iron Ambassador Martha Stewart then led visitors on a cinematic video tour of the factory floor, where iconic kitchen and bath products are crafted with at least 80 percent recycled materials.

The effect was twofold: it established credibility before a single new product was introduced, and it connected sustainability messaging to a 150-year manufacturing legacy rather than presenting it as a trend the company was catching up to. For brands with deep histories in the kitchen and bath category, KBIS 2027 is worth considering not just as a product-launch platform but as an opportunity to tell a story that newer competitors simply can't tell.

Modular and Reconfigurable Exhibits

There was a time when modular exhibit systems were considered the budget option — a compromise made when the custom-build estimate came back too high. That perception has been changing for years in the broader industry, and IBS is reflecting it. System-based exhibits have advanced to the point where they can deliver the visual impact of a custom build at a fraction of the lifecycle cost, and exhibitors who show up year after year are starting to realize the value of a booth that can be reconfigured, scaled, and refreshed without a full rebuild.

IBS exhibitors such as Sierra Pacific Windows, Versatex, and Lennox International have all used modular exhibits with strategic layouts built around products and business goals, flexible designs that adapt as needs change, and strong visual impact that helps brands stand out. The key insight from experienced IBS exhibitors is that the best modular systems don't look modular — they look intentional, and they function as a platform that gets smarter and more refined each year rather than starting from scratch. IBS 2026 also showcased modular construction systems engineered to cut waste, which mirrors a broader shift in the exhibit industry toward sustainable, reusable structures that satisfy both budget and environmental objectives.

Creating Context

One of the most underappreciated trends at IBS is the expansion of the exhibit experience beyond the convention center walls. The Pro Builder Show Village, an outdoor showcase of innovative products, building solutions, and best practices, allows attendees to explore a neighborhood open for self-guided tours. For building product manufacturers, this format is potentially more persuasive than an indoor booth because visitors are seeing products installed, performing, and contextually appropriate in an actual structure rather than mounted on a display panel.

The broader trade show industry has been slower to embrace outdoor or environmental staging, but the lesson from IBS is clear: When your product is meant to be experienced in context, the most powerful exhibit is one that creates that context. The New American Home, built annually as IBS's flagship show home, takes this principle to its logical conclusion — displaying cutting-edge products and technologies from top manufacturers, highlighting trends in energy efficiency, smart home integration, and luxury living.

If you’re exhibiting on the show floor, what does this trend mean for you? Using your exhibit to approximate that level of context is a strategy worth considering when it comes to experiential design, product integration, and attendee journey mapping.

Tech Integration

Technology was everywhere at KBIS 2026 — but the exhibitors who made the strongest impressions were the ones who integrated it into the exhibit experience rather than featuring it as a standalone attraction.

Samsung introduced its new line of Bespoke appliances and highlighted their AI-powered features through a live activation where attendees got their picture taken at a tablet, a robotic arm with a marker drew the portrait on branded paper, and a sticker of the sketch was printed with assigned column and row numbers. On a mural wall, participants located their square and attached their sticker, gradually completing a message — Bespoke AI Enabling Better Living. The activation was clever because it didn't demonstrate AI in the abstract — it made the visitor the output. People waited in line for it. They posted it. And they left with a physical artifact that kept the brand in their hand long after they left the booth.

If your product doesn’t offer that high-tech talking point, perhaps your exhibit can serve as a surrogate. Simply incorporating tech into the design, whether through immersive multimedia or an AI photo op, can provide a halo-effect that tethers your brand to attributes such as innovative, tech-aware, and future-forward.

At the technology spectacle end of the spectrum, Homes.com brought a full-body Proto holoportation device to its booth and virtually beamed in brand ambassador Heidi Gardner — the former Saturday Night Live cast member — who invited attendees to take a selfie with her. The results looked seamless. The booth generated media coverage and floor buzz well out of proportion to its square footage, purely because of the novelty of the activation.

This is worth noting less as a suggestion to book a hologram for your KBIS 2027 booth and more as a lesson about surprise and singularity. The most talked-about booths tend to have one thing that no one else on the floor is doing. It doesn't have to be technology. It can be an unexpected material, a one-of-a-kind collaboration, a live performance, or a sensory element no one expected. The goal is to give attendees a story to tell when someone asks what they saw at KBIS. What's yours?

The implication for exhibitors is that technology literacy is now a prerequisite for a productive conversation on the IBS show floor. To avoid looking like a luddite, it’s becoming increasingly necessary for exhibitors to thoughtfully incorporate technology into their exhibits. And, correspondingly, so is the need for exhibitors to work with exhibit and experiential agencies with the skills to accommodate those needs — from extensive multimedia know-how to award-winning content-creation capabilities.

Trend Forecasting Has Become a KBIS Strategy

A growing number of KBIS exhibitors are using their booth space to position their brand as a design authority, not just a product supplier. Sherwin-Williams is the clearest example. The company's booth at KBIS 2026 was dedicated entirely to its biennial Colormix Anthology trend report, presenting four color palettes poised to shape the future of home design. The booth wasn't a product display. It was a trend briefing that happened to feature Sherwin-Williams colors throughout. Designers who visited left with a point of view on the industry, and that point of view came with Sherwin-Williams branding attached.

KBIS 2026 booths broadly reflected the direction of the industry at large: warm saturated hues, organic materials, tech-forward interfacing, graphic surfacing moments, and a focus on health and wellness. The brands that won attention were often the ones that had leaned into those trends early and built their exhibit around them rather than retrofitting a trend message onto an existing product display. If you're planning your KBIS 2027 exhibit now, the question worth asking is: What does your brand have to say about where the industry is going — not just what you're launching?

The Exhibit as a Destination

Underlying all of these trends is a larger shift in what the best IBS exhibitors are building, which is not just a place to display products, but a destination worth seeking out. Hands-on equipment demonstrations. High-tech trappings. Curated trend-based commentaries. Each of these elements reflects the same insight — that attending a trade show is a choice, and an exhibit has to justify the time a visitor spends there.

The exhibitors making the biggest impressions at IBS aren't simply showing up with a nice booth. They're designing an experience that gives visitors a reason to come, a reason to stay, and something worth talking about when they return home. That's a lesson that applies well beyond Orlando or Las Vegas — and well beyond the building industry.

Interested in incorporating these insights into your next exhibit? Storylink Creative is a strategy-led experiential marketing and exhibit design agency specializing in trade show exhibits, branded environments, and immersive activations. If you're building your Construction & Design Week strategy, we'd love to be part of that discussion.

Contact us to start the conversation.