Steve Taylor, his wife and three sons spend their work days surrounded by the names of companies.
Nike. Domino’s. Dutch Bros. Cinetopia. Or more locally (and recently), Double Jump Video Games.
That’s because they work for Garrett Sign Co., creating and installing arguably one of the most important visual parts of a business.
“There are new technologies, but the sign is one of the oldest forms of advertising,” Steve Taylor said.
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According to a study called “The Economic Value of On-Premise Signage” by the University of Cincinnati and the Signage Foundation in 2012, 34 percent of shoppers associate sign quality with a store and its product quality. Twenty-nine percent make store choices based on information communicated by signs.
Take Sunlight Supply Amphitheater, for instance, Clark County’s event center in Ridgefield. When the county took on the new sponsor in 2015, it needed a new sign to flash to Interstate 5 passers-by. And there are a lot of them. Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 8, the Washington State Department of Transportation counted 147,850 travelers on that stretch of I-5.
The amphitheater hired Garrett Sign of Vancouver to do the job in March 2016. The sign team created and installed a high-tech, 50-foot-tall “message center,” as they’re called in the industry, as a way of advertising.
“If they can flash a different message 10 times before the car gets by, that means you just created a million impressions … multiplied by how many days a year,” said Garrett Sign owner Steve Taylor.
Messages are transmitted over broadband — much different from radio and fiber-optic wires used back in the old days. Taylor has been in the business at Garrett Sign since the mid-’80s. It’s where he met his wife, Dana. The both run the company. But the couple are slowly handing the reins over to their three sons: Dylan, 25, Joe, 36, and Jesse, 34.
Signs made from scratch by Garrett Sign dot the county, having been in the area since 1946.
Steve and Dana Taylor bought the business in 2004, Steve said, when Paul Garrett, the son of original owner Stan Garrett, retired.
“It’s a really cool, creative business. It’s unique in a sense because you’re fabricating something from nothing. We pretty much take raw components and build signs from scratch,” Steve Taylor said.
The shop, which employs around 28 people, has about a 15,000-square-foot workspace in the building at 811 Harney St. in downtown Vancouver, where they create signs for clients, ranging from small mom-and-pop shops to corporations such as Nike and Domino’s.
Most signs these days are illuminated by LED lights, which Taylor said are more energy efficient. In the old days, signs were often lit with neon.
“The neon is kind of a dying trade. There aren’t as many neon tube benders as there used to be. I still try to design with neon when I can,” Taylor said. “When you use neon nowadays, it’s specific to a particular design element.”
He mentioned sign regulations that must be followed. The city of Vancouver has a lengthy list, including what can and can’t be constructed in certain areas depending on the neighborhood (whether residential or commercial), the types of permits required, materials required and so on.
But Garrett Sign’s staff still gets creative.
The company completed a recent project for the new Hapo Credit Union branch at 13909 S.E. Mill Plain Blvd.
“It’s really beautiful from an architectural standpoint. That one took a lot of coordination and communication with the architects and us. (There were) a lot of laser cut elements to it,” Taylor said.
While most of their clients are local, some of their business stretches elsewhere. On Wednesday, a foreman in the shop was working on signage for a Big Al’s location in California. Their farthest away? A Cinetopia in Kansas.
Dylan Taylor, who received his business administration degree from Washington State University Vancouver in December 2017, hopes to go even bigger once he and his brothers take over.
“I’d like to continue growing it. I don’t want to say we’re small, but we’re not a major corporation. I’d like to be able to compete with the big guys,” he said. “Like the guys that do the signs in Las Vegas. Those are the big guys.”
