Designed at a precise 17-degree angle to meet the gaze of CES 2025 attendees as they entered the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall, HERE Technologies’ 3,500-square-foot booth proclaimed in a banner overhead, “There’s More in HERE.” And from a design strategy perspective, there certainly was.
For nearly a decade at CES, the location technology brand has aimed to showcase how its platform powers and drives efficiencies across different industries. Within its private meeting suites this year, sales leaders hosted some 200 deep-dives, tutorials and exclusive unveilings for customers during the show, a key marketing goal. But between the design and the build, the brand took a major step forward around its sustainability goals, too.
As Benjamin Arditti, senior director, global head of brand, at HERE Technologies, put it, “It’s not about showing sustainability, it’s about being sustainable.” We caught up with Arditti and Julien Le Bas, global head of sustainability and executive creator director at HERE’s agency partner, Jack Morton Worldwide, on the show floor for the scoop.
Moving Indoors
Known for many years for its outdoor two-story pavilion in Central Plaza, HERE has been a mainstay of the CES mobility sector. The team designed the pavilion to be reused year-over-year, with the steel components and glass encasements all stored locally. But with the steel reaching the end of its useful life, the team set out to get more bang for the buck by moving inside the convention center. By doing so, the brand reduced its impact by not having to pour a foundation, and utilized components of the convention center (like overhead rigging) to reduce construction needs as well.
Lighter Weight Construction
The team focused on the concept of “light-weighting,” leveraging a system that is fully modular and built on an aluminum base, so that it can be completely disassembled. As Le Bas described, “We decided to go for a hybrid between floor-supported and rigged, which is trickier, but allowed us to actually get rid of a lot of steel and structural material.” In other words, there were walls and windows affixed to the base, and thin wall structures that hung from rigging overhead. All of the glass featured this year has been used for HERE’s CES booths since 2017.
“We’ve been trying to balance sustainability with quality. We may have to sacrifice a little bit here and there, and patch here and there, because we are trying to reduce the amount of raw material that we use, and we’re trying to use as many modular, premade features as we can, but we’re willing to make some of those sacrifices,” Arditti says. “We don’t want this to look like a sustainable booth; we want it to look like a slick branded HERE booth that everybody loves and is a massive draw. But behind the scenes, similar to our product strategy, we are thinking about sustainability all time.”
Low-impact Logistics
For the first time the team worked with a local production vendor (instead of shipping from Germany, where the brand is headquartered), which helped reduced transportation costs and impacts. Next, the team analyzed the “legacy” of its materials, and how to create impactful showcases that don’t require excess materials.
Over the years, the brand has leveraged special lighting concepts, towers of data simulations and more to tell its stories. This year, the brand brought in two vehicles (OEM partners) into the booth as props, with LED towers and backdrops with moving imagery featuring fly-throughs of Chicago, based on the brand’s map database, framing them.
“As the brand has evolved, we’ve tried to get more human, more relatable, and tried to get our products more front and center in the experience,” Arditti says. “I think that culminates this year with having vehicles in the booth at CES for the first time, so we can allow visitors to experience what we actually do, which is always a challenge when you’re a data and software company. The more tangible you can make it, the better.”
Reused and Recycled Materials
The team aims to use materials that are standard in size to avoid “extra cuts” during production. Graphics are difficult to reuse because they don’t store well, so the team is working with an organization that shreds graphics to make furniture filling. All the furniture and A/V was rented locally as well.
“The whole idea is to look at each material and what we will do end of life, and then eliminate waste. So, we consider every single piece, and in some cases, we can simulate impact based on a bunch of factors, and then we make a decision, and then we measure the simulation against the actual at the end in terms of waste and carbon footprint,” Le Bas says. “And the whole idea is to have a full report where we can show progress, address benchmarks, and then for the year to come, identify areas of improvement.”
Data and Measurement for Impact
Arditti emphasizes that this process is not just about looking at cost comparisons, but comparing the overall carbon footprint of different proposals. This means starting the planning process earlier, and developing revisions based on that outcome. In this way, it’s about the power of decision-making to drive efficiencies. All of this, he says, is baked into the design process along the way.
“We’ve done a lot of work on analyzing reduction of impact versus cost increase. And it’s kind of a double curve, right? You start reducing your impact and the costs start going up. But there’s a big chunk of this process where you start to make smarter decisions. You become more efficient,” Le Bas says. “There’s a bit of a problem in the industry where everyone thinks, ‘Oh, if we make that sustainable, it will cost more,’ but the data shows that’s not the case. Maybe, the first question should be, ‘Do you need to make it?’ And then if you do, what about looking at it in a different way.”
This year, HERE’s cost per square foot was significantly lower than in previous years, as was the carbon footprint.
