Simulation: Running Warby Parker's Vision Expo Booth in Real Time
Objective: Make three real-time decisions across a single trade show day, morning traffic, midday staffing, and end-of-day follow-up, and see how each choice compounds into the next stage's outcome.
You're the on-site marketing lead for Warby Parker's booth at Vision Expo, the optical industry's largest trade show. You have a fixed booth budget and one day on the floor.
Decide how to handle slow morning traffic, midday staff behavior, and end-of-day lead follow-up, and live with each decision's consequence.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, sufficient to log a running budget total during the exercise
Free tier supports real-time lead logging with notes, enough to practice the decision without a paid badge-scan integration
No access? Google Sheets with a manually logged 'time captured' vs 'time synced' column
Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)
The free path is complete for practicing the decision logic in this simulation. A paid CRM/badge-scan integration only matters once you're running a real booth with a physical scanner.
Production-grade real-time sync with offline queuing for venues with unreliable Wi-Fi
No access? HubSpot CRM free tier plus manual badge-scan export
The process
Simulation
9:00 AM, Slow Morning Traffic
0 hoursDoors opened an hour ago. Foot traffic on the floor is steady, but almost nobody is stopping at your booth. The static frame display and standard signage aren't earning a second glance.
Visitors passing booth: ~40/hour. Visitors stopping: 2/hour. Budget remaining: $18,000 of $20,000 (day-of contingency fund).
What do you do about the slow morning traffic?
Final deliverable
A three-stage decision log recording each choice made, its verdict, and the outcome, plus a one-paragraph end-of-day summary of total leads captured and their follow-up readiness.
See a reference example
Nubank, Vision Expo simulation run (excerpt) STAGE 1 (Morning): Chose AR try-on display. Verdict: optimal. Visitor stops rose from 2/hour to 9/hour. STAGE 2 (Midday): Chose to coach the qualifying question. Verdict: optimal. Freed staffer to reach 3 waiting visitors in 4 minutes. STAGE 3 (End of day): Confirmed real-time CRM sync with offline queue. Verdict: optimal. All 118 leads reached sales same-day with qualifying notes attached. SUMMARY: 118 leads captured, 100% with qualifying context, 100% synced to CRM before booth teardown.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Makes a decision at all three stages, not just the first
- Can explain, using the lesson, why the costly option at each stage was worse than the optimal one
- Final summary reflects the actual compounding outcome of the choices made, not a generic wrap-up