Viparis Brand Guidelines: The 2008 Paris Venue Merger, Half CCI and Half Unibail

A chamber of commerce and a property group pool their halls.

Viparis runs the buildings that many Paris trade fairs, congresses and public shows are held in. It was created in January 2008, when the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIP) and the property group Unibail-Rodamco merged their convention and exhibition businesses. The trade site Europe Real Estate reported on 28 January 2008 that the two had signed the final agreement that day, after a process begun the year before and cleared by the French competition authority, with ministerial approval published in the Journal Officiel on 25 January 2008.

The agreement covered the ownership and management of venues as well as the organisation of exhibitions, and it set out that the venues would be run under one new brand name: VIPARIS, written in capitals in that announcement. Europe Real Estate said the new business began with nine venues in the Paris region and a combined exhibition surface of about 575,000 square metres.

A year and a half later the business-travel magazine Voyages d’Affaires, in a report dated 5 December 2009, described Viparis as presiding over the ten main convention and exhibition centres in the Île-de-France region. It quoted the CCIP’s chairman, Pierre Simon, saying the merger had brought real progress in coordinating the venues’ schedules and investment, and noted that the new Hall 7 at Villepinte was due to open in autumn 2010. Renaud Hamaide was then the company’s managing director.

French Wikipedia gives the same January 2008 date, citing Les Echos, and the same two shareholders, each with half. Its French slogan, as French Wikipedia records it, is “Bienvenue à Paris, l’art de bien recevoir” — welcome to Paris, the art of hosting well.

Porte de Versailles, Villepinte and the Palais des Congrès.

Viparis’s identity rests on its sites. The company’s website lists ten venues: Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, the Paris Convention Centre, Paris Nord Villepinte, Paris Le Bourget, the Palais des Congrès de Paris, CNIT Forest, Espace Champerret, the Salles du Carrousel, the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild and La Serre. French Wikipedia’s list, compiled earlier, has twelve, including a congress centre at Issy-les-Moulineaux.

The oldest name in the group is Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, on the southern edge of the city. English Wikipedia says its first exhibition buildings went up in 1923 to house the Foire de Paris, which until then had been held on the Champ de Mars, to plans by the architects Paul Viard and Marcel Dastugue; the fair settled there from 1926. In 1937 a monumental entrance with four illuminated turrets, still standing, was built by Louis-Hippolyte Boileau and Léon Azéma for that year’s international exhibition. The Paris motor show moved there from the Grand Palais in 1962, a large new hall opened in 1970, and the Paris Book Fair arrived in 1992; between 1996 and 2006 about half the site was rebuilt, according to the same article.

In November 2017 the CCI, Viparis and Unibail-Rodamco opened the Paris Convention Centre, built into Pavilion 7 at Porte de Versailles and reworked by the architects Valode & Pistre; French Wikipedia, citing Les Echos, gives its plenary hall 5,200 seats. In June 2019, English Wikipedia says, the artist duo Ella & Pitr finished a fresco of about 23,000 square metres on the roof of Pavilion 3.

To the north, Paris Nord Villepinte has more than 250,000 square metres across its halls, according to French Wikipedia. The Palais des Congrès de Paris at Porte Maillot has four auditoriums over four floors, according to French Wikipedia, and Viparis gives it as its head office. French Wikipedia names among the events held at Viparis venues the Paris motor show, the Foire de Paris, the Salon international de l’agriculture and Japan Expo, and in 2024 Porte de Versailles and Villepinte were Olympic and Paralympic competition venues.

Design and documentation.

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.

Two owners, one operator, many halls.

The ownership has stayed in two equal halves since 2008. Viparis says that the operating companies of its sites are owned equally by the Paris Île-de-France Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, and that they sit under a parent company, Viparis Holding, based in Paris. The company’s home page calls it a subsidiary of both.

Each owner supplies part of the leadership. Viparis says Bernard Michel, an elected member of the CCI Paris Île-de-France who represents its president on fairs, exhibitions and business tourism, has chaired the company since 2017, and that Arnaud Burlin, who joined Unibail-Rodamco in 2008 and served there as chief operating officer, became chief executive on 1 June 2023; French Wikipedia gives the same date.

The company describes itself as the European leader in hosting trade fairs and congresses, and says its venues receive more than 8 million visitors and 700 events a year. Those are the company’s own figures.

Viparis’s website is organised around those buildings: it lists each venue by name, alongside pages on its services, innovation, its corporate responsibility commitments and its news and events, and greets visitors with “Bienvenue à Paris, bienvenue chez Viparis.” The 2008 announcement had already set out the principle that the venues would be managed under one brand name.

For a design guide, Viparis shows how a venue operator can carry one name across buildings, from a 1923 fairground to a 2017 convention centre, that keep names of their own. Compare it with the Paris show organiser Comexposium and the Lyon events group GL events. For this guide we use hall indigo, glass roof blue and limestone with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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