The challenge
A research platform is hard to demo. The booth needed an object that did the explaining.
Novelution's flagship product — a clinical research software platform — is hard to demo in thirty seconds, and the conference floor is no place for nuance. Their team needed a booth object that would do the explaining for them: something delegates would actually pocket and bring back to their hospitals, not toss in a hotel bin.
The brief: a custom giveaway for HLTH 2024 that would make Novelution unforgettable on a floor full of healthcare tech. Budget was real. Lead time was tight.
The concept
A rubber duck in a tiny lab coat.
We anchored the booth around a single surprising object: a fully custom rubber duck wearing a Novelution-branded lab coat. Each duck shipped with a tag explaining how research moves faster when the data "floats to the surface." The metaphor wrote itself, and the object did the rest.
Two SKUs — one scientist duck, one executive duck — let the team play favorites with hospital researchers and the C-suite buyers behind them. The mold work was custom. The coat was real fabric, not printed. Color matching took eleven rounds.
The outcome
Gone by day two.
The ducks were cleared out of inventory by mid-morning on day two of HLTH 2024. Booth traffic was up materially over the prior year. More importantly, the duck became a recurring asset across Novelution's social, sales kit, and recruiting collateral — a story object that kept telling the story months after the conference packed up.
The second wave for HLTH 2025 is already in production.
