Easyfairs Brand Guidelines: Eric Everard’s Brussels Show Organiser and the Word “Easify”

A student fair, an art fair and a merger.

Easyfairs is a Brussels-based organiser of trade shows and consumer exhibitions that also runs its own exhibition halls. The company traces its roots to 1988, when its founder Eric Everard, then 24, organised the first European Student Fair, according to its own history page. English Wikipedia says Everard founded the student magazine Univers-Cité in 1986 and co-founded the Salon de l’Etudiant two years later, extending it to other European countries as the Erasmus exchange programme began.

In 1997 Everard founded Artexis — “the Art of Exhibitions” — which ran Art Brussels and antiques shows, the company says; English Wikipedia names the antiques fair as Eurantica. Artexis went on to manage exhibition halls in Belgium, including Flanders Expo and Antwerp Expo. English Wikipedia, citing La Libre Belgique, dates the founding of Easyfairs to 2003; the company’s timeline places the launch, with new offices across Europe and dozens of new events, in the years from 2004 to 2010.

For a period the two businesses traded together as Artexis Easyfairs. In September 2016 the trade magazine AT Minerals reported that Artexis Easyfairs had bought the Dutch organiser Evenementenhal, which ran 78 events a year at three locations in the Netherlands, and that the purchase lifted the group to 11 exhibition centres and more than 200 events. Evenementenhal brought halls at Gorinchem and Hardenberg, the company says. English Wikipedia says the Artexis brand was retired in 2017; the company dates the merger of Artexis and Easyfairs to 2018.

The Nordic side came earlier, in the years from 2010 to 2014, when the company took over the management of Malmömässan and Kistamässan in Sweden, its timeline says. In 2018 Easyfairs was named Belgium’s Enterprise of the Year, English Wikipedia says, citing L’Echo and Le Soir.

Show brands, owned halls and a made-up verb.

Easyfairs describes itself as a multi-format organiser: trade shows and consumer exhibitions, fan events, summits, congresses and conferences. On its website it says it runs 125 show brands, drawing more than 1.5 million visitors and 34,000 exhibitors a year in 18 countries, and that 90 per cent of its events are business-to-business. When Inflexion announced its investment in May 2024, it described Easyfairs as organising 110 exhibitions in 12 countries across 12 industry verticals, among them packaging and logistics, manufacturing, industrial processing, hospitality and construction.

Much of the portfolio has been bought rather than launched. The company lists earlier acquisitions including ADF PCD Paris, Packaging Première and Aesthetics, and, since 2024, UK Metals Expo, EPHJ and CHEMUK, plus EPC, which it calls its first acquisition in North America.

Venues are the other half of the business. Easyfairs says it operates halls in three countries, five of them owned, covering 215,000 square metres. Its venue list names three Belgian halls — Antwerp Expo, Flanders Expo and Nekkerhal Brussels North — the two Evenementenhal halls in the Netherlands, and two Swedish venues, Kistamässan and Malmömässan. A venue manager quoted on its website says that combining the roles of organiser and venue operator gives the company freedom to launch new events with less risk.

The identity is built around a word. The company calls “easify” central to its brand promise: whether someone is an exhibitor, visitor, guest organiser, partner or employee, it says it wants to “easify” their life. Its other recurring line is that it enables communities to “visit the future of their industry.” Its tools for exhibitors carry short, plain names — EasyGo, BoosterPack and Online365. The spelling has shifted over time: older items on AT Minerals’ site, including a notice about two Dortmund fairs in 2012, write “easyFairs” with a capital F, while the company now writes Easyfairs. Its media page offers separate Easyfairs logo files for web and for print, alongside logos for each venue.

How organisers present themselves.

Exhibition and trade-fair organisers sell two things at once: the shows themselves and the places that hold them. Their corporate websites reflect that split. GL events, for example, divides its group page into Live, Venues and Exhibitions, while Easyfairs gives its owned halls in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden their own section and logo files alongside the group mark.

Most of the visible branding belongs to the shows rather than the parent company. A group may run more than a hundred show brands, each with its own name, logo and audience, so the corporate identity often works as an endorsement in the background. Many show names simply state a sector, a material or a place, as Global Industrie, UK Metals Expo and Packaging Première do, while others, such as Sirha or Première Vision, work as names in their own right.

Photography does much of the work. Organisers publish wide shots of busy aisles, stands and halls, and some credit the photographer by name beside the show and city, as GL events does on its exhibitions page. Venue pages lean on floor areas, hall counts and plain descriptions of what the space can be shaped into, from a small trade show to a large conference.

Behind the shows sit practical tools for exhibitors and visitors, described plainly: online portals, exhibitor packages, floor plans and visitor registration. Corporate pages then cover the owners, the board and the venues held under ownership or concession, often with a dated history timeline. This guide sets out what can be checked about each organiser — who founded it, who owns it and which shows and venues it runs — and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

Founder, two investors and two chief executives.

Easyfairs stayed in its founder’s hands for most of its history. On 30 May 2024 it announced a strategic investment from Cobepa, a Brussels-based privately held investment firm, and the private equity firm Inflexion, which described its part as a minority Partnership Capital investment. The company announced completion on 24 July 2024. Everard reinvested a significant portion of his majority stake, the company said, and the three parties have equal representation, with two directors each at holding-company level; Everard stayed on as chairman.

Day-to-day leadership had already changed in 2022, when Anne Lafère and Matt Benyon became group co-chief executives and Everard became chairman, according to the company’s timeline. It says it has about 1,150 team members of 38 nationalities in 22 offices across 12 countries in Europe and Algeria, with its headquarters in Brussels. English Wikipedia says AMR International’s 2018 ranking of exhibition organisers by revenue placed Easyfairs 18th; the company now says it is among the top 20 organisers in the annual STAX ranking.

Sustainability is part of the public story. In 2021 Easyfairs signed the Net Zero Carbon Events pledge, and in 2024 it published its first annual sustainability report, the company says; it lists the UFI Sustainable Development Award among its recognitions.

For a design guide, Easyfairs shows how a show organiser can turn its own name into a verb and make that verb its promise. Compare RX, the organiser that renamed itself in 2021, and Comexposium, a European group that also manages a portfolio of show brands. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm coral and soft greys with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Easyfairs’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.