SHL Medical
SHL Medical Trade Show Experience

SHL Medical is the pioneering manufacturer behind a large share of the world's self-injection devices. Its products are small, precise and, at a glance, almost identical to one another, which makes a trade show floor a difficult place to explain what separates them.

borabora studios created the entire digital side of SHL's touring booth: the content, the interfaces, the software and the systems that keep it running across every show. It is all built around a single gesture. A visitor picks up an actual device, sets it on the shelf of the Portfolio Wall, and the screen above responds with that product's story: what it does, who it is for, and what sits inside it. The object stays in the visitor's hand and the explanation arrives around it, so the conversation with the sales team continues rather than pausing for a presentation.

Behind the wall sits a content management system that SHL's own teams operate. Product pages, service overviews, company figures and published research are all maintained in one backend and pushed out to every screen on the stand, in English, Chinese and Japanese.

The applications themselves run offline. Each machine downloads and caches its content ahead of a show, then plays independently of whatever the venue's network is doing that week, which matters when the same stand appears at CPHI in one region and another exhibition on the other side of the world days later. Matching sets of pre-configured hardware live in Europe and the United States, shipped from show to show, so the booth arrives ready rather than being rebuilt each time.

Trade show technology is only as good as the people running it at seven in the morning on setup day. The stack was built around that reality: kiosk-mode playback that recovers on its own, a documented update routine, on-screen progress during content installs, keyboard shortcuts for the crew, and written troubleshooting guidance for the situations that actually come up on site.

The system has grown with the programme since launch, adding a touch table, an editable company-figures page that SHL updates itself, and a publications viewer for the research the team brings to each event. What began as a single interactive wall now carries the digital side of a booth that travels the world several times a year.