Canton Fair — Jennifer Qian

Overview

Across a 13-day sprint at the Canton Fair, designed a booth and sample store that spoke to three different audiences at once — 80% of store visitors converted into franchise leads.

Retail Booth+Franchise Pitch

Retail Activation Franchise Identity Fair Design Brand System Live Broadcast

80+ Vendor Booths

20K+ Visitors

13 Day Sprint

80% Franchise Leads

Strategy Brief

The Canton Fair is the world's largest trade fair, running 13 days with 20,000+ visitors across categories. Yuanfang's franchise food platform needed to communicate its brand to three fundamentally different audience types, simultaneously, within a high-traffic, visually competitive floor environment.

Franchise Partners

Evaluating the Yuanfang business model as an investment opportunity. Needed to see platform credibility, scale, and ROI framing at a glance.

Individual Entrepreneurs

Interested in a single product or starting a small operation. Needed approachable pricing and a clear product story.

General Visitors

Exploring the fair floor without a specific intent. Needed visual appeal, sampling opportunities, and guidance into the booth.

Challenge

Design a single brand presence that simultaneously functions as a retail environment, franchise pitch, and visitor experience, without losing coherence across all three.

Context

80+ vendor booths on the Yuanfang floor. The sample store was the primary conversion environment: 80% of sample-store visitors were prospective franchise leads.

My Role

Design Intern covering booth setup, store interior curation, live broadcast graphics, product display layout, signage placement, and on-site visitor guidance.

Space & Identity Design

The brand presence spanned two distinct environments: the main vendor floor and the Yuanfang sample store, each requiring different design priorities and audience communication logic.

Fair floor overview: 80+ vendor booths across the Yuanfang footprint. Signage and visual hierarchy had to work at distance before visitors stopped.

Sample store exterior: designed to draw visitors off the main floor and into a conversion-optimized interior environment.

Product display: organized by category and franchise relevance, with franchise-facing SKUs prominently featured.

Product profile system: each featured product included visual identity, origin story, and franchise positioning.

Brand Assets & Live Broadcast

Visual production extended beyond static signage into live-format content: the fair's live broadcast stream required real-time graphic support that maintained brand consistency while adapting to a dynamic on-floor environment.

Booth SignagePrint and display materials communicating platform identity, vendor categories, and franchise credentials at the booth level.

Sample Store InteriorProduct display layout, flower wall installation, and signage placement designed to guide visitors from browsing to conversion.

Live Broadcast GraphicsOn-screen overlays, titles, and product spotlights produced for the fair's live streaming coverage of the Yuanfang floor.

Visitor Guidance SystemPhysical wayfinding from the main floor into the sample store, using directional cues, staff positioning, and threshold design.

13-Day Sprint

The fair ran for 13 consecutive days. Design and operations ran in parallel: assets were produced or adapted on-site as the event evolved and visitor patterns became clear.

Pre-Open

Booth Setup & Store Dressing

Pre-opening day: booth assembly, product display layout, flower wall installation, and signage placement across all zones.

Days 1–3

Visitor Flow Observation

Monitored which signage and display elements drew visitors in and which product profiles generated franchise inquiry. Adjusted placement accordingly.

Days 4–8

Live Broadcast Production

On-site graphic support for live streaming coverage: real-time product spotlights, brand overlays, and floor highlights.

Days 9–13

Sample Store Conversion

Full focus on visitor guidance through the sample store. 80% of store visitors identified as prospective franchise leads by event close.

Impact & Reflection

Impact

80+ vendor booths, 20,000+ fair visitors, and a sample store where 80% of visitors were prospective franchise partners. The design system successfully translated a franchise food platform into a coherent brand presence across three distinct audience contexts (retail, pitch, and general discovery) within a single physical environment.

Reflection

The Canton Fair taught me that design at scale means designing for many simultaneous audiences, not one. The most critical skill wasn't creating standout visuals. It was understanding the conversion logic of each audience type and building a spatial and visual system that could speak to all three without contradiction.

Documentation