Every quarter, Buff City Soap creates new signage for upcoming promotional sales. The sales and items often change, as the company’s success is always growing and expanding.
With barely a week turnaround from start to finish and an average of 7-10 sets of signage, I was looking for a more streamlined process. If we had a system in place, the variables of approval and rejection would be less and give us more time to work on quality.
This was my first set of signage created just a month after I started. I was given directions to update most of the existing signage sets to make the deadline, except for the Black Friday signs. The Black Friday had to be created from scratch, and I was allowed to break some informal rules, such as no dark backgrounds, for the solution. This was my only original contribution to the signage sets sent out for that season.
Everything was great for a few weeks while we printed the signs and shipped them to the field. Then, the week of Black Friday hit, and we started getting calls from the franchises.
Our signs hang on the inside and are seen through the glass, which made the black background and thin white type as effective as invisible ink.
The Black Friday signage might have failed in the application, but the company, consumer, and franchises’ reactions were very successful.
Since I had inherited signage as my role, I decided to explore more options that utilized the well-received elements while adjusting for the environment’s feedback.
My marketing managers were on board with this mission, and I was given free rein to explore possible solutions. I was directed to add Buff City Soap’s identity to future concepts, so I pulled on external visual cues in the store or the products.
Having ruled out the ideas of textured backgrounds or bold graphic overlays, we returned to Black Friday’s successful simple color backdrop. We decided to try a few different color systems to gauge how much color and variety was wanted and needed.
We fell in the middle, with just two shades of medium and dark teal as our background. To avoid repeating the Black Friday mistake of a disappearing background, both colors were tested in a store’s windows before being approved, finalized, and applied to all signage.
The final design has been the system we have successfully used since Spring 2023. The marketing team received many enthusiastic compliments from happy franchise investors, and our internal approval time was down to a day- and usually an immediate approval.
Our marketing impact increased two-fold compared to the same quarters in 2022, and we reduced the number of signs reprinted and replaced quarter-to-quarter.
