Tarsus Brand Guidelines: A 1998 London Show Organiser, Labelexpo and Informa in 2023

A UK organiser built by Blenheim veterans.

Tarsus was a UK-based organiser of business-to-business trade shows. The media-industry newsletter Flashes & Flames reported in January 2023 that it was launched in 1998 by Neville Buch, a former chief of Blenheim Exhibitions, and that Douglas Emslie, who had worked at Blenheim and UBM, had been its chief executive since the start.

The records at Companies House, the UK company register, show how the parent company took its name. It was incorporated in March 1986 as BBB Design Group plc, was renamed Tarsus Group plc in June 1998 and became Tarsus Group Limited in January 2009. The same register lists a set of subsidiaries named for regions and markets, among them Tarsus America, Tarsus China, Tarsus Medical and Tarsus Overseas, and Tarsus Group Limited remains an active company on it.

Tarsus was at one time a listed company: Flashes & Flames calls it “formerly listed.” In 2019 it was bought by the private-equity firm Charterhouse Capital Partners. Informa later wrote that Tarsus plc was acquired by Charterhouse that year, and that in the years that followed the portfolio grew through 24 new launches and 11 targeted acquisitions.

The Flashes & Flames profile, written after a conversation with Emslie, described a group of some 160 events in sectors including labels, print and packaging, travel, medical and textiles, concentrated in the United States and Mexico, the Middle East and China. It noted that Tarsus was “notably absent from the UK” as an organiser, despite its UK base, and did not intend to change that. The same article said that, after the Charterhouse purchase, the new owner funded at least 14 acquisitions and joint-venture investments over an eighteen-month period, and that Tarsus had been particularly active in China.

When Informa announced its purchase, Stephen A. Carter described Tarsus as a business “built around major brands in attractive, specialist B2B markets in the growing regions of Asia, China, the Middle East and the Americas.”

Labelexpo, Intertraffic and SIUF.

Informa’s announcement of 9 March 2023 gives the clearest dated picture of what Tarsus owned at the end of its independent life. It described a portfolio of more than 160 live and on-demand business events, and said its top ten brands drew about 515,000 attendees and more than 8,350 exhibitors across some 385,000 square metres of net floor space.

Informa grouped the shows by market. Packaging meant the Labelexpo series, held in the United States, Mexico, Europe, China, Thailand and India. Infrastructure meant Intertraffic, Rail+Metro and Cambuild. Sustainability meant Intersolar, Mexico WindPower and Aquatech Mexico. Homewares meant Hometex in Shenzhen and Zuchex, and fashion meant the SIUF show and OFFPRICE. The list also included beauty and healthcare congresses, and Informa noted that Tarsus benefited from biennial events held in odd-numbered years.

Labelexpo, the first name on Informa’s packaging list, has since been renamed. The old Labelexpo Europe web address now forwards to LOUPE Europe, whose site explains the new name as an acronym for “Labels & Outer-Packaging Embellishment” and also as a reference to the precision magnifier of that name. The site describes the show as the leading event for the global label industry for more than 45 years, and says it now covers mid-web flexible packaging and inline folding-carton converting as well as labels.

The same site gives figures of more than 37,000 visitors and 670 exhibitors from 140 countries, and sets its 2027 edition for 5–8 October at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona. It names Informa Markets, a trading division of Informa PLC, as the organiser.

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.

From an independent group to part of Informa.

Informa, the London-listed academic, business-markets and digital-services group, announced on 9 March 2023 that it had agreed with Charterhouse and the other shareholders to buy Tarsus. Its group chief executive, Stephen A. Carter, said Informa had “long admired the Tarsus business,” and Emslie said he “could not think of a better partner.”

Informa set out a combination programme that was to end in January 2024 with the two portfolios “operating as one company under the Informa brand.” It named Mark Temple-Smith, then chief operating officer of Informa Markets and formerly Tarsus’s chief executive for Asia, as executive chair of Tarsus until then, and said Emslie would become a senior adviser to the group.

The deal closed quickly. On 22 May 2023 InPublishing carried Informa’s statement that it had “recently completed the acquisition of Tarsus,” ahead of schedule; Informa had expected completion by 1 July.

Tarsus no longer trades as a separate organiser. Its former web address now forwards to Informa’s corporate site, and its Labelexpo Europe show now runs as LOUPE Europe under Informa Markets.

For a design guide, Tarsus shows how an organiser’s own name can recede behind the show names it built, until a buyer folds them into another brand. Compare Informa, which absorbed it, and Hyve Group, another London organiser that changed owners in 2023. For this guide we use a deep navy, a label cream and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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