Cost-Effective Signage
As retailers across the board look for new ways to minimize waste, save money and improve margins, one area is often overlooked: physical branding, signage and wayfinding.
Critical to the store and customer experience, a chain’s graphic program can be made more efficient without taking away its impact. Here are some tips from Marty Gregg, president, Arthouse Design, Denver, which specializes in three-dimensional design and signage, to help retailers get the most out of their signage investment:
Use materials strategically.
One of the easiest ways to save money is by using high-end materials in strategic places where they will be seen, and to use more “humble,” yet complementary, materials in low-touch areas, or for background.
According to Gregg, humble materials include sintras (foam-core sheathed in plastic for added durability) and vinyl. These materials are less expensive and will last until the next re-branding. Plus, they look great in specific applications.
“In Japan, for example, consumers like lavish wood materials,” Gregg said. “So you often find real wood in the high-touch, high-impact areas. But in the low-impact, low-touch areas, or for a background, you find graphic or vinyl films that look like wood. These have pressure-sensitive adhesives on the back. You attach the material, burnish it down, and nobody can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not from a distance.”
“Gang” information together to minimize the number of signs.
To do this, a retailer has to assess the messages, establish which are the most important and then develop a hierarchy that features the most important messages more prominently.
“One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to over-sign, which insults the customer’s intelligence, or to have too many signs when, oftentimes, one sign might be able to encompass all the messages,” Gregg said.
Have a signage system—set graphic systems and live by them.
“While this might seem obvious, many stores don’t have a pre-determined signage system with graphic standards,” Gregg said. “What happens is that someone goes off and makes a sign. But it’s wrong and doesn’t match, and consequently has to be redone.”
For example, in a wayfinding and signage project for a sporting-goods chain in Colorado, Arthouse had the chain cut off all the tags from the sleeping bags.
“Each sleeping bag had a different type of tag from a different manufacturer, and the tags were all different sizes,” Gregg said. “It looked incredibly messy, and customers had a hard time finding what they wanted.”
Arthouse put a store logo tag on the tags and color-coded them according to price points so that shoppers could easily find a sleeping bag in their price range. All the tags used the same typeface.
“This system might not work for everyone, but the point is to have some kind of system,” Gregg said. “Make it consistent in size, color and type, and make it easy to maintain. All this saves money because you are not re-doing things constantly.”
Use prototyping before diving into a signage project.
“This strategy can be a huge money-saver,” Gregg said. “Beta-testing, or prototyping, can save a lot of money because you work out the kinks before you go into volume production.”
Work with design professionals who will incorporate your needs and goals in a cost-effective manner.
Some examples of ways designers can be resourceful, according to Gregg, are: Leave the store intact and simply re-clad or recover existing way-finding elements, which allows for an entire re-packaging without investing heavily in new hardware; develop new signage that uses the “bones” of the current signs and designs and builds off them.
“If you can avoid demolition of a current sign asset, a store can easily save $20,000 worth of metal and concrete, not to mention labor costs,” Gregg said.