GL events Brand Guidelines: Polygone Services of 1978, Lyon and a Red Brand Signature

Four partners, two renamings and a listing.

GL events is a Lyon-based events group that builds temporary structures, runs venues and organises trade fairs. It began in 1978 as Polygone Services, founded by Olivier Ginon and three partners, Olivier Roux, Gilles Gouédard-Comte and Jacques Danger, French Wikipedia says, citing Challenges and Libération; French Wikipedia spells the first name Polygones, while the company’s own timeline writes Polygone. That timeline also records an early partnership with Cré-Rossi.

The business was renamed Générale Location in 1989 and took the name GL events in 2003, French Wikipedia says. The company places the launch of the GL events brand in the years from 1998 to 2003, alongside its listing on the secondary market of Euronext Paris; French Wikipedia gives 1998 as the year the shares were first quoted in Paris.

Through the 1990s the company grew by acquisition and opened a site in Dubai, its timeline says. French Wikipedia, citing the business magazine Capital in October 2025, says it worked on the Albertville Winter Olympics and the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992 and on the 1998 football World Cup in France. The company adds the Cannes Film Festival and the Sydney 2000 Games to its list of events from those years, and later the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the London 2012 Olympics.

The 2000s brought a run of purchases. Between 2004 and 2009 GL events bought businesses including the fashion fair Première Vision and Temp-A-Store in the UK, and took on venue concessions in cities including Budapest, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Brussels, according to its timeline.

Live, Venues, Exhibitions — and red.

The group is organised in three divisions. GL events Live offers turnkey services for events, from the consulting phase to production; GL events Venues manages a network of more than 60 venues, such as convention and exhibition centres and arenas; and GL events Exhibitions designs, produces and manages trade shows and consumer exhibitions, the company says. It reports more than 6,000 employees in over 20 countries.

The exhibitions division was launched between 2010 and 2015, the timeline says, and now counts about 150 of its own events, from exhibitions to conferences and competitions. The company names fashion and textiles, the food industry and swimming pools as its strongest sectors. Its show names include Sirha for food and Première Vision and Tranoï for fashion — French Wikipedia cites FashionNetwork on the Tranoï purchase in August 2020 — and Global Industrie, a trade fair the company says it created between 2016 and 2021. In 2025 Sirha Lyon set a new attendance record, the company says.

Red is the brand’s stated colour. On its group page the company writes that “red is more than just a color, it’s our brand signature,” and ties it to red-carpet award ceremonies, the stands at large sporting events and its trade shows. Its website credits photographs of shows such as Global Industrie and Première Vision in Paris to named photographers, and credits the agency Saentys with the site’s design.

The head office is itself a statement. French Wikipedia says the company moved from Brignais, in the Rhône, to Lyon’s Confluence district, giving 2014 for the move. In April 2012 the building-trade site Batiactu described the new head office by the architect Odile Decq on the Quai Rambaud: a steel-framed, largely transparent block carried on three steel piers, with a 28-metre cantilever over the quay and a work by the Italian artist Felice Varini on its façades.

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.

Stands, stadiums and concert halls.

The live division’s work is the most visible part of the group. GL events was an official partner of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games; French Wikipedia, citing Le Figaro, says it supplied grandstands, technical equipment at several sites and the fitting-out of the venue at the Château de Versailles. The company says it provided 70 per cent of the Games’ temporary infrastructure. It designed and built the Grand Palais Éphémère, the temporary exhibition hall in Paris, French Wikipedia says, and it was an official sponsor of the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France.

Venues have grown through long concessions. On 5 August 2025 GL events took over the concession for the Stade de France for 30 years, succeeding the Vinci–Bouygues consortium that had held it since 1995, French Wikipedia says, citing the French sports ministry. In Brazil the company opened São Paulo Expo between 2016 and 2021 and inaugurated the Anhembi site in 2024 under a 30-year contract awarded in 2022, its timeline says; in France it won the concession for the Parc Chanot exhibition centre in Marseille in 2024.

Its newest step is into concert halls and theatres. On 26 March 2026 the Lyon news site Lyon Mag reported that France’s competition authority had cleared GL events to buy the venues run by Fimalac, including the Salle Pleyel in Paris and 25 halls in the regions, and that Fimalac would take 1 per cent of GL events’ capital; French Wikipedia dates the acquisition to March and April 2026. GL events remains listed on Euronext Paris, with Olivier Ginon as chairman and chief executive, according to the company’s board list.

For a design guide, GL events shows how an events group can let a single colour carry the brand across stands, stadiums and shows. Compare Comexposium, another French organiser with a portfolio of show brands, and Viparis, which runs exhibition venues in Paris. For this guide we use a strong red, a deep charcoal and warm greys with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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