As any illusionist will tell you, sometimes things are not quite what they seem. That was certainly the case when I was managing an exhibit for a U.S. client at a show in Hamburg, Germany. The show opened on a Tuesday, and the previous Saturday both my client and I received confirmation that his crate, which contained all the products for two wall-mounted display areas, had been delivered to the show venue. However, when he arrived on site on Sunday, he immediately realized that the crate sitting in his space belonged to someone else.

Upon further inspection, we noticed that the labels indicated the crate was bound for Cologne, Germany, some 200 miles away. We didn't even bother to crack open the mysterious crate, which clearly contained nothing of interest to us. Rather, we directed our time to tracking down our crate – and devising a secondary plan just in case it didn't turn up in time for the show.

We knew we'd attached the proper labels in the United States, but what happened after that was a mystery. So we contacted a rep from the show's on-site shipping contractor, who was convinced our crate had ended up in a nearby warehouse. We had to move mountains to get someone to visit the warehouse to check for our crate, but the search turned up nothing.

Our next call was to the outbound shipping agent, who had a hunch that somehow our shipment had been switched with the mysterious crate in our booth. She suspected that if we contacted the Cologne address listed on the crate, we'd likely find our wayward shipment. A quick call to the location proved fruitless, as the business was closed and wouldn't open until the next morning. So instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket, we began work on a backup plan.

We decided to create some graphics to cover the empty space on the walls where the products would have been displayed. Working with our in-house shop, we roughed out some ideas for text to highlight the products' features, added some logos, and sent the files to a Hamburg print shop that could whip them up Monday morning.

As we worked our magic, our shipping agent was apparently working some voodoo of her own. Somehow she got in touch with the business in Cologne, and sure enough, it had our crate. When the airline offloaded the freight in Frankfurt, someone must have mislabeled the shipment – even though there were multiple labels from the U.S. shipping agent with the proper exhibitor name, booth number, and show-delivery address.

Thus, in the wee hours of Monday morning, a special truck made the trek from Cologne to Hamburg with the shipment, giving my client most of the day to install the products and offering us enough time to cancel our rushed graphics order.

So thanks to the shipping agent's hunch, our show went off without a hitch, and both crates made it safely to their intended destinations – despite the unintended detour.