Making business relationships happen at the world's biggest events.

By Grip's own count, it has powered more than 5,000 events and booked over 2 million meetings. Behind that is a sprawling product: Manage for registration and exhibitor portals, Engage for sessions, meetings, and matchmaking, a white-label mobile app and participant web app, lead retrieval, and a new agentic layer for organisers.

I'm the only product designer, reporting to Lizzie Evans, our CPO. That means I own design end to end, from the first audit to the last edge case, across mobile, web, and the design system that holds them together.

The mobile app had grown one feature at a time. iOS and Android behaved differently, it lagged behind the web in places, and there was no single picture of what “right” looked like. On a show floor, with patchy venue Wi-Fi and a packed schedule, those gaps really hurt.

The organiser side had its own version of the problem: key jobs, like coordinating meeting schedules, were happening outside the product entirely, in external tools.

Every project starts the same way: audit what exists, find the gaps, then solve them in priority order. For the React Native rebuild, that meant rebuilding the app page by page, with a Mobile Master file as the single source of truth and a mobile design system behind it: 48px touch targets, 4.5:1 contrast, and documented components. An accessibility audit sorted every finding into what to fix first, and offline support keeps the app useful when the venue Wi-Fi isn't.

My favourite detail is the schedule. A vertical day-guide line runs through your day, solid for accepted meetings and dotted for pending ones, so you can read the whole day at a glance, time clashes included, before you walk into one.

For organisers, I designed a meeting scheduler that brings coordination back into Grip: one page, two modes (normal and MustMeet), participant and company schedules, bulk actions, and meetings you can create straight from an empty calendar slot. A native integrations wizard connects registration providers like Swoogo and Bizzabo, with field mapping, custom fields, multi-language mapping, and run logs. Grip's own product deck says it can save 70% of your team's time.

App Builder turns shipping a white-label native app into a guided wizard: configuration, file uploads, then review and build for iOS and Android, with clear started, failed, and completed states. And tiered lead retrieval gives exhibitors Basic and Pro plans, a builder for lead qualification questions, and qualifying, comments, and offline capture on mobile, with an upgrade path to Pro built in.

The rebuilt app and new tools are rolling out now. Early customer feedback has been warm and engagement is up. Lead retrieval has landed especially well with exhibitors; as Flyn Roberts, Chief Commercial Officer at Messe Frankfurt Middle East, put it: “Being able to just scan a badge and get all the information that you want, then make notes about the lead and rate them is important to the exhibitors.”

Just as important, Grip now has a design system and a source of truth the whole team builds from, so every new feature starts on solid ground.