There's a specific kind of tired that only comes after a show weekend, the kind where your voice has gone slightly hoarse from two days of conversations and your legs ache from standing on show ground rather than a workshop floor. That's roughly where the LUCARI team found itself on Sunday evening, driving back from the LRO Show at Belvoir Castle with a van, two Defenders and a stack of new contacts.

Mees, Leo, Thomas and Hannah packed up practically the full showroom on Friday and headed north to Lincolnshire for two days on the stand. Saturday in particular was relentless. Not in a bad way, more the sort of relentless where you look up and realise it's gone 3pm and nobody's had a proper break, because there's always another conversation worth having.

We started running a Question of the Day in the workshop a few weeks ago, mostly as a way of getting customers talking while they waited. Bringing it to the stand this weekend turned out to be one of the better calls we've made. In our experience, most people walk past a stand fairly quickly unless something gives them a genuine reason to stop. It got people talking. More importantly, it got them actually looking properly at the vehicles rather than glancing and moving on, which worked better than we'd expected.

Show weekends aren't constant chaos, though it can feel that way from a distance. In the quieter pockets, Leo sat down with trade partners in person, which is worth more than a dozen phone calls when you're trying to build a working relationship. Thomas and Mees got facetime with both suppliers and long-term customers, the kind of catching up that doesn't happen over email. Hannah, meanwhile, had the team making content between conversations. A handful of Q&A videos answering questions we'd already had on the stand, plus some behind-the-scenes footage of the day itself.

One of the better parts of a show like this is spotting your own work out in public. We found our chocolate leather seats and dash pieces built into a Defender on the YRM stand. More of our work turned up in visitors' vehicles parked outside. Interestingly, our Iroko wood accessories made on site here in Rye were one of the biggest talking points of the weekend, more than we'd anticipated given they're a relatively small part of most builds. Spotting your own stitching and joinery on someone else's vehicle is a strange pleasure of this trade. You start recognising grain and stitch patterns the way most people recognise faces.

We also had a proper full-circle moment with a customer who'd recently ordered black leather seats with a custom green stitch for his 90. He was so pleased with how they'd turned out that he brought the vehicle over at the end of the day so we could see them fitted in person. We ended up talking through what's next for his build. It's a small detail, a stitch colour, but it's exactly the kind of choice that changes how a cabin feels day to day.

 

If you're at a similar stage with your own vehicle, our Defender fitting and install centre team can talk you through fitting once your build is decided.

Mees drove the van up with what felt like the entire showroom fitted inside it. Leo and Hannah took the 110 soft top and Tom drove the 90 V8. The journey up and back turned into half the fun. The cars got a fair amount of attention on the motorway. A few people who'd spotted us en route found their way to the stand afterwards purely off the back of it. If you've been considering a Defender soft top conversion of your own, ours has covered a fair few miles this year and it's holding up well.

Weekends like this matter for LUCARI in ways that are hard to put a number on. They build trust with customers who get to sit in the seats, feel the leather and talk through upgrades face to face. They often help push orders over the line that started life as a stand conversation months earlier. It's not so different from our day at the Game Fair earlier in the summer, where the same pattern played out. Just as importantly, they bring the team together. Everyone stepping up for each other over a long weekend, representing LUCARI exactly how it should be.

 

Great weekend, brilliant team! If you want to see more of what we got up to on the weekend, watch our behind-the-scenes video on Instagram. 

 

There's more to come from us at events across the rest of the year. If you'd like to see the range in person or talk through your own Defender project, you can read more about who we are or get in contact with us for more information and we'll take it from there.