Pleased to meet you!

I was really honoured to receive a special award at the Powtech opening event this year for two decades of service on the event’s advisory committee.   It’s been a great experience to represent the exhibitors’ perspectives as the show has developed and grown, especially as I am the only person on the committee working with analytical instrumentation.  Throughout this post you can see photos taken at Powtech and other events in Germany during the past 20 years – can you spot anyone who you recognise?

Receiving the award got me thinking about how important events such as Powtech are, because they provide an opportunity to meet with our customers and build new relationships.  While it’s true that we have so many different ways to connect these days – email, Linkedin, forums and Twitter to a name just a few – there is nothing quite like having a face to face conversation.

One of the greatest benefits of Malvern going to exhibitions and conferences is the feedback and insight we get – that chat we have over coffee about your new research, or your new process requirement sparks ideas that can turn into new products, new accessories, or updates to software, that make life easier for you in the lab or the factory.  For example, we can trace the development of the our Spraytec laser diffraction particle size analyzer back to discussions at the annual Drug Delivery to the Lungs (DDL) conference with experts such as Julie Suman at NextBreath LLC and David Morton at Monash University, where together we realised how laser diffraction could provide product performance data not accessible using other techniques.  So great collaborations can come out of meeting face to face like this.  Whether that be supporting a new lab with their instrumentation needs, or working with academia or industry on new instrumentation developments, often the initial conversations happen at exhibitions like Powtech.

The events also provide an opportunity to show off what’s new at Malvern.  We’re constantly adding and improving our range, so visiting us at exhibitions is a great opportunity to see how we can help to solve your latest analytical challenges.  Your instrumentation needs change rapidly, and so do our solutions, so having a catch up at the booth helps us to match the two together.  Maybe the last time you saw us, we didn’t have a wet small volume dispersion unit for your Mastersizer – well now we do (the Hydro SV), and at events like Powtech you can often see them in action and maybe even test your samples.  Or perhaps we can introduce you to completely new measurement concepts which may be the perfect fit for your research, like DLS-Raman, the technique behind our new Zetasizer Helix, which is a great solution for drug development.  You may also be surprised at how the design of our instruments has changed in recent years – we’ve (mostly) left the beige behind, and now offer a sleek looking silver range that looks the part in a modern lab.

Finally, at Powtech, and many other events we attend, a visit to the Malvern booth is an opportunity to take a break with a coffee or a beer, rest your weary legs, and have a chat with our technical experts. They are an encyclopaedia of knowledge about Malvern’s instruments and a myriad applications, and are always really happy to help you with any questions you have.  Sometimes your questions are so pertinent that we turn the answers into blog posts, so that more people get the benefit of that experience.

We’d love to hear what you get out of meeting with us at exhibitions, conferences and meetings, and what you think we can do better at future events.  You can let us know via Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook.

If you want to find out where you can meet Malvern, you can use our events & training search.