Somebody at Redgate has ordered a box of tiny server racks, built by hand, carrying the same product logos that ship on the real software, and then ordered another.

Redgate makes software for the people who look after databases. Its buyers are engineers, and engineers are the single hardest audience for a trade-show table, because the entire vocabulary of that room reads to them as noise: the pens, the tote bags, the stress balls, the branded water bottles. By the far end of a conference the aisle has learned to walk past all of it without slowing down.

So the object became the thing their software actually runs on: a miniature server rack and the laptop in front of it, in Redgate red, with slide-out drives, status lights and printed panels carrying the company's own tool logos rather than a generic decal. The specificity is what does the work. A developer walking past recognises a rack on sight, and recognises which rack, and that recognition is the reason they stop. It is the opposite of a giveaway that could have come from any stand in the row.