Expo Direct is our sister company. It launched in 2021, selling the same furniture and catering equipment we use in our own hire fleet — to customers who want to buy rather than rent.
Why it exists
Running a hire business is hard on equipment. Products get loaded, unloaded, stacked and used hundreds of times a year. Anything not built to handle that fails fast. Over the years we found products that looked right in a catalogue but fell apart in the field. So we stopped looking at catalogues and started designing our own.
By 2021 we had a range we were proud of. Customers kept asking to buy. Expo Direct was the answer.
How the products are made
We visit China regularly and work directly with manufacturers to develop products to our own designs and tolerances. We specify the materials, the construction and the finish. The rule is simple: if we trust a product in our own hire fleet, it goes in the Expo Direct range. If we would not hire it out, we do not sell it.
Two products we are proud of: we launched a three-leg beer bench design that has since been widely copied — it is structurally more stable than the traditional two-leg version. And we rebuilt the specification on the standard folding chair to a point where it holds up to commercial use rather than just looking like it might.
Who uses it
The same products have been supplied to the Commonwealth Games, the British Grand Prix, Wimbledon, Oxford University, and Google’s European headquarters in Ireland. They hold up at those events; they will hold up in your venue or business.
Expo Direct supplies venues, caterers, schools, offices, sports clubs, and private customers who need equipment permanently rather than for a single event. It also ships outside England and Wales — including Scotland and Northern Ireland — where Expo Hire does not deliver.
Same team, same warehouse
Expo Direct and Expo Hire are run by the same people from the same 30,000 sq ft warehouse in Birmingham. When you contact either company, you speak to the people who manage the stock and handle the orders.