Who says that customer service is dead? Not us. That’s why when one of our customers called us at 6pm on Friday night, the Friday before the 4th of July holiday, explaining that the sign shop they went to for a parade banner messed it up. How do you mess up a predesigned banner? Let me tell you……
The artwork was scaled to 50% of actual size which is pretty standard. As the artwork files get larger, sometime we use a scale of 10%, but a lot of the time it’s set at 50%. So it wasn’t a surprise when the church unrolled the banner and instead of 32′ long, the banner was only 16′. The really odd part was that it was 2′ tall. Not sure what happened there. Trying to find a production person on a Friday night is never easy but add in that it was a long weekend and I thought I might be out of luck. Not this time. My production manager stepped up and said he would head back to the shop to make the banner.
With a banner that is 32′ long, there are a couple of things that have to be done to ensure that the banner is perfectly square. One of the nice things about the HP printer that we use to print banners like this is that it has built in software that monitors and manages skew. Skew is when you print anything of length the possibility that the roll of vinyl doesn’t progress perfectly. Never happens with Optimum Signs. At 32′, you think it would take an hour to print out this much material but in fact, it took less than 20 minutes. Table time was closer to an hour as we had to cut the banner, seam the banner and place the grommets so they could attach the banner to the trailer. Some of the banners we make we don’t seam, we cut edge-to-edge. Most of the times we use this kind of presentation is when the banner will be used once and thrown away. The seams give strength and stability to a banner that will be outside in the elements or just somewhere that the customer may want to have around for a while.
If you need banners for your church event or any other event please give us a call. Just preferably not on a Friday night before a holiday. We are always happy to assist and can be reached at 262.289.9481 or emailed at info@optimumsignswi.com.
