FFAIR, the UK-based independent exhibitor management and eCommerce platform, has been used by more than 13,000 exhibiting companies at 122 events during the first six months of 2025 – equal to its total for the previous three years. While the number of shows using the system is relatively small (estimated 141 this year and 250 next) the trajectory indicates that FFAIR can help exhibitors and organisers alike to save time, money and adminstrative hassle.
In the first half of this year, the system processed 3,186 orders of 32,133 items and generated £2.5mn of sales through the FFAIR shop. The average order value reached £787, with 57% of exhibitors ordering online and 68% placing orders ahead of earlybird deadlines.
CEO-founder (and longtime event techie) Adam Jones believes his rising success is about more than just the commission that exhibition organisers can make from sales: “The exhibitor experience has become critical to the success of an event, especially as corporate marketing budgets tighten. Event organisers realise that it’s not just about exhibitor sales, but about retention — and that means giving their exhibitors a smoother, more satisfying pre-event experience as well as demonstrating monetary return.”
In a somewhat softer measure of success, he asserts: “We’ve had reports of ops teams leaving the office on time, picking up their kids from school, going fishing and investing in their own personal development. The platform is addressing the age-old problem of busy event operations departments sitting at their desks until 9pm. This is what real transformation looks like.”
The independent UK publisher and events organiser Mercator Media used FFAIR for its Seawork and Icelandic Fisheries Exhibitions and is an enthusiastic customer: “We found the FFAIR system to be very well organised, clear, and easy to navigate. Creating content was straightforward, the ability to build our own tasks and add show-specific information made the process highly efficient. Our exhibitors found the system to be user friendly and especially liked being able to order items via the online shop rather than contacting individual suppliers. The online shop ecommerce system also proved highly effective for our finance team, significantly reducing the time spent on invoicing and chasing payments.”
It’s good feedback, of course, and FFAIR claims that many of the large event organisers are customers. But the scale of its business (£750k revenue forecast for 2026) shows that much of it is from the smaller independents or just individual events from some larger groups. For all its current development to turbocharge the platform via AWS and to ramp-up marketing in the UK (70% of the current business) and US, there’s a very long journey still for the company to win the support of anything like a majority of exhibiition organisers.
Some of that is due to the obvious financial constraints of a self-funded small company with a tiny sales team – and most its resources devoted to developing the embryonic system and support for clients.
Perhaps that should create the scope for larger organisers to consider licensing the system on a white label basis from FFAIR. Not that this is currently on offer. Whatever the strategy, some organisers – mostly in the UK, US and Australia – are euphoric about what FFAIR means to their operations. With or without new investment (or heavy participation by the likes of Informa, RX or Clarion) could this clever system be the future for events everywhere? Or something very like it.
| SnapShot FFAIR | |||
| £k | 2026 est | 2025 | 2024 |
| Revenue | 740 | 420 | 154 |
| % from annual licences | 50% | 75% | 80% |
| EBITDA | 360 | 70 | — |
| Margin | 49% | 17% | — |
| Headcount | 15 | 13 | 8 |
| Purchases on system | £4mn | £1.5mn | £0.6mn |
| No. of shows | 250 | 141 | 55 |
