I’ve been walking trade show floors for 30 years. I’ve seen a lot of showrooms. Most of them are fine. Some are genuinely impressive. Just a handful, over all those years, have stopped me cold.

Takeform’s space at THE MART during NeoCon 2026 stopped me cold. I saw it first while I was wandering the 10th floor on Friday prior to the start of Chicago Design Week.

It’s worth unpacking why the showroom matters, not just as a curiosity about one Western New York-based signage company’s creative ambition, but as a signal about where experiential design at Chicago Design Week is heading.

Here’s the setup. Takeform, for those who don’t know them, are the signage and experiential graphics people with a showroom at THE MART rather than tucked down on the seventh floor. They’ve been in the building for a while and with this NeoCon, they decided to throw out the rulebook entirely. Gone is the gallery wall. Gone is the vertical market storytelling. In its place: a full-commitment, surrealist recreation of a 1970s department store, executed with a level of detail and wit that you genuinely don’t expect to encounter at a tradeshow, even one with permanent showrooms.

We chatted with Takeform’s leadership on the opening morning of NeoCon, and what struck me most in the conversation was the clarity of the thinking behind it. “Love it or hate it,” one of them told me, “one of the keys to success is you’ve got to be memorable and you don’t want to look like everybody else.” That’s not a radical insight on the surface. But very few companies actually follow it to its logical conclusion.

Takeform did. The concept came from co-president Mike Hungerford, who pitched it after an initial strategy session where the team agreed on one guiding principle: go full experience, no half measures. A surrealist 1970s department store. They researched the era’s great retail interiors — Bloomingdale’s, BHV in Paris, others — and began the months-long work of translating that reference into something that could simultaneously function as a client conversation space, a product showcase, and a piece of installation art.

The execution is where it gets genuinely impressive. The shoe department anchors the space, with shelving stacked floor to ceiling in the period palette, deliberate, almost dreamlike color steps that make the room read as something encountered rather than designed. The top two rows of shoeboxes contain Takeform signage in various design styles, which means the whole elaborate set dressing is also a product catalogue you can browse at your own pace. The perfume counter features 3D-printed representations of Takeform’s recently refreshed standard products, each containing actual functional fragrance. You can actually spray them. And the album rack at the back of the “store” features custom-designed record covers, period-accurate in style, with every face on every cover being a Takeform employee.

I mentioned Meow Wolf to them — the psychedelic Santa Fe arts collective whose immersive installations have redefined what experience design can be outside the gallery context. They’d already looked at it as a reference. That’s the conversation Takeform is inserting themselves into, and it’s the conversation that Chicago Design Week, as it matures, increasingly needs to be having.

There’s a growing cross-pollination between the residential design world and the contract sector that shows very well at Fulton Market Design Days. As THE MART itself is being asked to compete with an increasingly confident and open-access alternative just a few blocks west, showroom designers are beginning to understand that the audience has changed. The specifiers, the designers, the young creatives who will be the next generation of this industry’s clients have grown up in a world of immersive experience as standard. They’ve been to Meow Wolf. They’ve walked through Museum of Ice Cream installations in Chicago. They’ve stood in lines for pop-ups. A showroom that simply puts product on walls and asks them to imagine the possibilities is increasingly a showroom asking them to do work that they don’t want to do.

Takeform understood this. They also understood something more subtle. If you sacrifice a little of your precious square footage at THE MART to create a threshold space, somewhere a visitor can step into without fully committing, without triggering the “here comes a sales person” response, you dramatically increase the probability that they’ll stay. They told me so directly. Get them 10 seconds in the doorway and the rest follows.

As Chicago Design Week continues to find its voice as a unified design moment for the city, one that can hold its own against places like Clerkenwell and Milan — experiential showroom design is the future.