Blockbusters: Standing out from the Crowd

How do you make an impact at a trade show? For many companies, an enormous booth with extravagant, gourmet catering is simply not financially viable. And when a show has hundreds – or even thousands – of exhibitors, it can be hard to stand out. For attendees themselves, it can also be daunting to approach booths of unfamiliar companies. A booth should make attendees feel comfortable and welcome, which is easier said than done. Too often, it can feel a little awkward as you wait for people to approach and start conversations.

June’s BIO 2024 event in San Diego had 1400 exhibitors and over 19,500 attendees. Biopharma consulting and technology development company BrevisRefero (based in Ontario, Canada) had a plan to encourage conversations: LEGO. The company built a biologics CDMO facility out of LEGO bricks, complete with interactive elements that activated at the push of a button, such as a fill/finish line that filled and capped vials.

Many of us have fond memories of LEGO from childhood (and plenty of us also have LEGO hobbies as adults!) – and it was clear to see that the display was inspirational. It was also topped off with a LEGO treasure hunt that challenged attendees to move around various sponsor booths to collect the LEGO pieces required to build a bioreactor.

It was a clear hit at the show – with queues at the sponsor booths to collect the LEGO pieces.

With so many companies struggling to know how to make the most of their booth investment, we thought it would be interesting to speak with Terry Cochrane, President of BrevisRefero, to learn more about the story behind the LEGO facility and the challenges of finding new business opportunities at a busy show.

What inspired this project?
 

In 2023, we sent a 4-person contingent to BIO for the first time since 2019. In our wrap-up after the show, we were left with the general sense that we did not truly make or leave an impact. Granted, we had one partnering pass and three exhibition hall passes, but the four of us felt like nomads roaming around the exhibition hall hoping to bump into some sort of business opportunities by chance!

It was deflating. As we sat at the airport contemplating this, we started throwing around the idea of a booth for BIO 2024 in San Diego. The problem is that no one is really all that interested in a consulting firm booth and it can be hard to get traction at such a large venue. Unless we could do something spectacular, there wasn’t really a point to having a booth.

In the background, our company was considering an educational partnership with Humber College in Toronto on a project called BrickMMO, led by our lead developer Adam Thomas.

Adam is a professor of coding at Humber. He noted it was difficult teaching first year programming because coding is abstract unless you can immediately evaluate cause-and-effect on your code. Being a LEGO enthusiast, Adam developed the BrickMMO project around a SmartCity installed at Humber College. It is essentially a purely built LEGO brick city that runs on code – from streetlights and driving cars, to a fully student-coded GPS system for the city, all the way to a radio station reporting on events through ChatGPT.

Sitting at the airport and contemplating an elevated booth experience at BIO, the initial idea was suddenly born, although somewhat in a joking manner to begin with. What would happen if we created an educational interactive, biologics CDMO facility built of LEGO bricks, and brought it to our booth at BIO 2024?

The seed was planted, but we needed to probe the idea further. As part of a companywide team-building exercise in July 2023 at the SmartCity in Humber College, we introduced the idea and broke up into teams to start creating manufacturing suites. From here, we worked to refine and develop the concept further until we eventually landed on the facility we presented at BIO 2024.

What was the process of creating the facility?
 

BrevisRefero works with several clients on conceptual engineering design of GMP manufacturing facilities. We decided to apply the same approach we would for any project; we started by creating a floorplan. The core of the facility featured the main manufacturing suites for biologics production, such as upstream, downstream, and fill/finish suites. We also added two laboratories to the facility – quality control and process development – representing the full delivery chain in biologics manufacturing. There was even a warehouse and shipping/receiving too.

The facility was built entirely of genuine LEGO bricks by Adam, who was supported by our biopharma consulting team in terms of creative guidance and direction to ensure the facility would be recognizable by delegates at the conference.

The external appearance of the LEGO facility was modelled after an actual CDMO located in Laval, Quebec called Biodextris (who were also our first trusted sponsor of this initiative).

How long did it take to build?
 

In total, it took 10 months to plan, build, code, and develop the multi-media reels associated with each button click.  The metrics we have on the facility are as follows:

• 25,273 LEGO bricks
• 691 lines of code
• 5760+ people hours amongst 12 team members
• 8,304 km round trip travel to/from BIO 2024
• 103 ft of wire to power the facility
• 49 LEGO characters
• 10 hidden ‘Easter Eggs’ within the facility
• 5 CDMO sponsors of the facility

What were the most difficult elements?
 

Each element wasn’t incredibly difficult to make on its own, but the project as a whole was challenging to pull together for release at BIO 2024 because it was a marketing project that was crammed into everyone’s busy schedules on top of their day jobs! However, it was the perfect mash-up of our biotech and tech departments that really united the team around a cause that had such a common base of understanding – given the LEGO connection we all have as adults through our childhood exposure.

A big issue we faced was how to ship the facility to and from San Diego from Toronto, so that we didn’t end up with a shipping container full of completely dismantled pieces. After nearly 6 months of working out shipping details and creating customized boxes for each part of the facility modules to be packed into the shipping crate, we finally solved this challenge.

Another challenge was the fact that prior to this adventure, we were not a company that had an internal digital media department. We had to build that function from scratch while preparing for the conference to support our social media buildup for BIO. It was like ‘building the plane while flying it,’ but I’m happy to say that all our sponsors were incredibly satisfied with their involvement in our social media campaign and this wider initiative. We’ve had such a great response to our digital media offering that we’re continuing to offer these services for biopharma and CDMO companies in our network (shameful plug – reach out!).

What were your favorite details in the LEGO build?
 

Personally, I liked every one of the manufacturing suites and each of their unique interactive elements – the shaking incubator and DNA scanner in the process development lab, the mixing tanks and chromatography screens in the downstream suite, wave-bag and stirring bioreactors in upstream suite, a fill/finish line that included filling and capping vials, and an autosampler and SDS-PAGE screen in the QC lab.

As a business owner, I was also very encouraged and proud of how this project united our talented team. Seeing us go from an idea leaving BIO 2023, to a team building event where we explored the idea, all the way to the more than 10 months of building and creative development to deliver a truly unique experience for our sponsor companies that everyone in the company contributed to was truly a rewarding experience.

How did attendees at BIO react?
 

The reaction was awesome and overwhelming! We’ve all experienced that awkward walk-up moment to a trade show booth where the exhibitors are sitting in a chair and waiting for the delegate to come up and start a discussion. Having our CDMO facility of LEGO bricks as the showpiece at the booth created a completely non-threatening walk-up for delegates, and immediately opened the door for a conversation because of many people’s childhood experiences in building with LEGO. We had thousands of delegates come by to check out our creation, which in turn stimulated many fruitful discussions and follow-ups after the show with both us and our sponsors.

We collected metrics on behalf of our sponsors to give some insight on how we were able to drive traffic to their booths through a ‘Build a BIOreactor’ treasure hunt. This was a 19-piece bioreactor made of LEGO pieces. Delegates had to visit our CDMO sponsors booths to collect all the pieces to build the bioreactor. We were able to collect the following metrics:

• Social media lead-up to BIO: >29,000 views on LinkedIN with >2200 comments made and 21,800 video views.
• The facility at BIO: >1.6 presses of the facility buttons per minute, resulting in 2,456 plays of the bioprocessing educational segments over the course of the conference that we created for each sponsored room.
• The Build a BIOreactor event: more than 3,383 conversations started because of delegates moving from booth to booth. This works out to 1 delegate at our CDMO sponsors’ booth every 3 minutes over the duration of the BIO conference.

What were the most interesting trends you noted at BIO?
 

As always, the most interesting trends for us being CMC and biopharma professionals are those related to outsourcing. We’re seeing some hunger in the biopharma CDMO business right now that is creating a very favourable competitive environment for innovator companies looking to outsource their development and manufacturing programs. We’re noticing this both in our daily interactions with sponsors, but also from our own platform (RFP>Navigator) where we’re seeing a healthy competition of proposals to posted RFPs. The next 1-2 years will be interesting as more financing comes back into play as investor confidence continues to build in the biotech/biopharma industry.

Stay tuned for our marketing plans for BIO 2025 – rolling out shortly!

Note: LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this project.