Conference Ideas

At Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs event in 2014, organizers eschewed a traditional red carpet in favor of stairs leading to the event space emblazoned with a custom typography message bearing the name of the occasion.

In 2013, New York’s famous Costume Institute gala had a punk-inspired theme. Nodding to the genre’s British and American origins, designers dressed the museum’s staircase with American and British flags made entirely of 150,000 red, white, and blue roses.

At the Corcoran Gallery of Art gala in Washington in 2012, a baroque-style gobo decked out the museum’s grand staircase, which is lined with marble statues and busts.

In its first year in Canada, 2014, the TED conference decked Vancouver Convention Center's stairs with color-blocked sections printed with the conference's tagline, "The next chapter starts here.”

Saveur hosted its Summer BBQ in New York in 2014. To get attendees excited about what would greet them within the outdoor culinary event, the words "cocktails," "sweets," "photo booth," "music” and others decorated a staircase.

Each year, E3 takes over multiple halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center, as well as its lobby areas and on the plazas outside. The show and its vendors take over stairs for marketing and branding, as in this example from 2013, which used both the stairs and surrounding columns.

Cole Haan took to New York in 2012 to introduce its Chelsea Pump, marketed as a shoe that can be worn late into the night. As part of the brand’s “Don’t Go Home” campaign, it hosted dance parties at a venue where the stairs bore messages announcing reasons to stay out late.

Event designer David Beahm used votive candles in a snaking pattern down the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairs for a private corporate event.

In a more straightforward take on the look, a display of 1,200 votive candles lined the stairs in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the opening-night party for Bullets Over Broadway in New York in 2014, greeting the 900 guests as they arrived from the St. James Theatre.

Sabra Dipping Company set up a pop-up dining experience called Hummus House in Washington in 2014. Within the space, stairs leading to the second floor were decorated with pots containing dried vegetables meant to represent various flavors of the brand’s hummus.

Moët & Chandon was the official champagne partner for Sex and the City 2, and as such, the brand worked with Warner Brothers to host an advance screening of the sequel at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago in 2010. The brand decorated the stairs at the venue with branded stars reminiscent of the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame.

Engadget hosted a meet-up for its readers in New York in 2011. Not missing an opportunity to brand the venue for 1,400 guests walking the stairs, the AOL-owned tech blog used them as surfaces on which to plaster its logo.