The booth that burned on the road to Madrid

Someone asked me recently what my most career-defining moment was, and I did what you’d expect and started mentally flicking through the obvious contenders, the big campaigns, the global stages, the moments where everything lands perfectly and you get to go home pretending it was all effortless.

But the story I kept coming back to didn’t involve an award, or a standing ovation, or even a particularly glamorous venue. It involved a motorway, a ruined lorry, and 5,000 purple teddy bears, and it happened right at the beginning of my career.

Madrid, 1999

It was ERS Madrid, one of the biggest European medical congresses, and I was working for a small experiential agency outside London, supporting Glaxo Wellcome, a pharma client who was about to unveil a new flagship exhibition system we’d spent months designing, building and obsessing over. I was the Producer, with only my designer alongside me to supervise the build, which felt mildly heroic at the time given I was still early in my career, although in reality I was already on my 30th show and had just enough confidence to be dangerous.

Everything was lined up beautifully. The booth was bold, tactile and properly immersive, the planning had been smooth, the lorry had left London on time, the team were in Madrid, and we were set.

And then, two days before show open at 7.30am in the morning, there was a knock at my hotel door, and my designer was standing there looking pale in a way that instantly told me this wasn’t going to be a small problem.

“The booth’s on fire,” he said.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Two hours north of Madrid, the lorry had caught fire, so we drove straight out, half disbelieving it until we arrived and the disbelief got replaced by that cold, practical feeling you get when the universe has clearly decided to spice things up. The scene was surreal: a scorched metal frame twisted into something abstract, lighting melted into shapeless black drips, panels charred beyond recognition, and 5,000 purple teddy bears scattered along the hard shoulder like a bizarre crime scene that no one is ever going to believe when you tell it later.

This was 1999, so there was no WhatsApp group, no shared Google doc, no “quick sync” on Teams, just a Nokia phone, a fax machine, dial-up internet, and the slightly haunting realisation that you were going to have to fix it with judgement, relationships, and sheer nerve.

I made the phone call you never want to make, and I can still remember how the client sounded, calm and composed, asking a few questions, taking it in, and then landing four words that changed the entire temperature of the situation.

“I trust you to fix it.”

Forty-eight hours of controlled chaos

Once someone hands you trust like that, you don’t really get to indulge in panic, so we moved quickly and we got practical. An older booth system of theirs was sitting in storage with another vendor, not as impressive and not what we’d planned to show off, but clean, workable and, crucially, available, so we had it shipped overnight and started rebuilding the plan in real time, reconfiguring layouts, installing what tech we could, and stitching together a functioning space out of sheer momentum and collective refusal to fail. It was my first and only all-nighter.

Forty-eight hours later the booth was standing, and when the congress opened it ran smoothly enough that you could almost convince yourself it had been the plan all along, which is one of the great little miracles of live work when a team is locked in. The client arrived smiling, there was no blame and no drama, just a quiet nod that we’d done what needed to be done, and I learnt more in that window about trust, teamwork, and creative resilience than I ever have from any award.

The aftermath that became a beginning

A few years later I was in the US at Jack Morton Worldwide when my office phone rang, and it was that same client, who had moved to Pfizer, tracked me down in the pre-LinkedIn era (which feels like an archaeological period now), and wanted us to pitch for a major new booth.

We did, and we won, and it was a neat reminder that you never really know where a catastrophe might take you if you keep your head, act with integrity, and, crucially, avoid burning bridges… even when everything around you is literally on fire.