Going Yard—How COVID Changed the Landscape for Yard Signage

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Print Precision, a Digitech podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. And folks, welcome to another episode of the show. It is a beautiful Friday afternoon, and we are ready to dig into some quality print industry thought leadership. Before we get to today's main conversation, I wanna make sure you're getting all the Digitech content you desire. So go to our website, digitech usa dot com. Again, digitech u s a dot com for more information on the various solutions and services we're gonna be chatting about today, but also for some digitech thought leadership, including episodes of the show, videos, blogs, articles, and more. You can also find episodes of the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe. Alright, everyone. For today's episode of the show, we're doing a bit of a postmortem on what I like to call a niche COVID trend, but one that meant major opportunities or major defeat for companies in the printing industry. So because of COVID's mass closures across basically all industries, yard signs, again, yard signs saw a surprising boost for print companies. And for some of those companies, that meant big cash flow during some stressful months. So with the explosion of this side of the industry and with COVID being treated behind us here in the US, we're wanting to explore this interesting side effect of the pandemic, how it impacted printing companies and whether yard signs will remain a viable business opportunity in the long run or if the market is going to settle back down and even out to some kind of normal. So here to offer some insights, we're joined by two guests, both veterans of the Print Precision podcast. So first up, we're joined by Patrick Caldaway, founder and president of Digitech. Patrick, great to have you on. How are you doing? Great. Great. Great to be here. Always a pleasure chatting, Patrick. Good to be back. And returning for the second time, we're joined by Mr. John Parrott, president and vice president of Parrott Printing. John, great to have you on. How you doing? Thank you for having me. Happy Friday. Yes. Happy Friday. It's a pleasure to have you back on. And John, I love that you're calling in today from the print floor. You're giving us some great visuals. If I have my sources correct, you're in the middle of what, one hundred and fifty thousand square foot job right now. So just give us a little check-in. How's it going for you? Yeah. We're about halfway through, and, it's been exciting. Now it's just, buckling down and trying to finish it up. But smooth as butter, printing, cutting, packing, it couldn't go any smoother. It's all you can ask for, smooth as butter. And the first time we had you on the podcast, John, you were actually detailing your journey as a new Digitech customer after only having the TruFire printer for a few months. Now we're eight months after your first appearance. So I got to ask, how has your experience been now coming up on almost a year of running the TruFire Digitech printer? Is Digitech walking the walk? You got any hot critiques here for Patrick live on air? Has been your experience like? I thought this was a friendly Yeah. Sorry, guys. Just right off the bat. No. It's it's been good. Honestly, we wouldn't be printing this job if it wasn't for this machine. I mean, I think it's it's a pretty demanding job and a pretty demanding timeline. And without it, you know, I don't know what we would do. It wouldn't be possible even if you were running a couple machines, two, three shifts. We're just buckling down, and it's it's making our job easier. It's what the machine's doing. So it's So what saying if you were printing twenty boys an hour, you'd be in trouble? You wouldn't do it. No. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna have to on the cutting room floor. We get compared to twenty boards an hour machines all the time and it drives me nuts. That's why had throw that in there. I love it. No. It's the quality, you know, it's it's met the customer expectations. The ink durability is that's the thing that, you know, on a lot of machines we've run-in the past, I I wouldn't be sleeping at night knowing, oh, man, is that ink sticking? Am I gonna have curing issues? You know, this is a lot of signs stacked pretty high, boxed up. It's a lot of weight, you know, and so it's got to be cured properly, to make sure there's no issues, you know? Absolutely. Well, to that point, it's now time to chat some printing industry thought leadership. So, before we get really deep into our conversation today on yard signs and some of the wins the industry saw from products over the last year, year and a half. I'm curious, if you can both kind of lay the groundwork for, again, how COVID impacted the industry. So where would you say, I guess, for both the general printing industry and then the signage printing industry, where were these industries hurt the most by COVID over the last year, year and a half and why? I think I can start with that one. I I think that without without question, the the trade show industry was hurt the worst. I think it hit them really hard. I mean, was completely devastating. I think beyond that, it was sporting events or any other event that you try to do and then next in line was retail. And I think that's why we're on the topic that we're on today because I mean, here we are building printers over here. We spent a ton of money on R and Ds, ton of money trying to get everything right. We spent trying to get our workflow right, everything, you know, kind of lined up and boom, this hits and then we had to kind of shift over and try to find out what the hot markets were. And I think that's why we're having this conversation today. I mean, it's yard signs. Yard signs were one of those that was like a big surprise. Somebody would have told me that the amount of people that would have been or at least the people that were already involved in yard signs. I started right away once I realized the trend when COVID started to let some of those good customers of ours know that, hey, there's a hot market out there, yard, which is yard signs but it didn't really pay off for them. You had to be in it to a certain extent to really capitalize on it. And I think some of the guys out there that had the business already and knew what they were doing with the yard sign business really, really did well with COVID and you know, other companies, other industries didn't. So how do you see it, John? Yeah. It's been a big opportunity. I think where it's hurt the most was a lot of the closure of businesses. Obviously, a lot of our key accounts were frozen. So key accounts being frozen, you gotta make up for in other ways. We were all way already established as a pretty well pretty good yard sign printer. So when things started opening back up, knowing there's delivery, knowing there's pickup, lots of restaurant business, lots of retail businesses that want you to know that they're open. And now we're even seeing that trickle forward where, you know, it was, hey, we're open, we deliver. Now we're seeing it with the hiring issues. People are not able to hire and bring on good labor. And we had that same good customer during the pandemic come to us, and he was kinda complaining when he was picking up an order about getting getting good quality people. And he was talking about the price of billboards and the contracts and the commitments that you have to put out to put a billboard up. I said, man, for five hundred dollars, I'll put you a great campaign together. And, you know, we got a callback later that week saying, man, we already hired everybody. We're that was the best five hundred dollars we could spend. So, I mean, it's it's transitioning into other ways. You know, it's not just we're open. It's not just we'll deliver. People are seeing it as avenues to promote other items. You know? Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, the entire landscape has really shifted and has accelerated trends that were already present in some of those industries you broke down. But, you know, I think what may have been seen as unexpected is just how much yard signs were going to carry some of these companies, printing companies, through the pandemic. So I'm curious, did printing companies anticipate that there could be a boom around yard signage when the pandemic hit the US? Or was that something that everyone just kind of realized in real time? Was it a more in the moment, reactive, potentially even disorganized mass response there from the industry? How did you see that reaction? Was there any anticipation? I'd say all of those because I mean, first of all, you didn't see the pandemic coming. And so there was only so much material out in the field. And I mean, it it was wild when we were in the middle of it. And then, you know, there was the graduation signs. So that was huge all over the country. And you called and you tried to get wire stands. You could not get wire stands. And I was like, how you know, there's one manufacturer of those. That's all they do is make wire stands. And there was a shortage across the country. You started seeing shortages in corrugated, and this is not due to transit from overseas to here. That's just the demand spike so high. So I don't think anybody really saw that coming, and it just boomed so fast, you could not keep up with the demand. And, you know, we're still seeing kinda signs of that. I mean, now more, it's it's other materials. It's but there's there's been a lot of and that's a whole another ballgame. I won't go down that road. But yeah. No. I think it's a combination of all of what you said. Yeah. From from, you know, the normal, which was a political science, which was a heated political year to, you know, and that politics went to, you know, back the blue, you know, they're all over the place. You had form of expression now, yard signs became or you know, people couldn't get out. Yeah. They weren't a lot of reasons, they weren't even out allowed to go places. So here they are with expressing themselves with these yard signs and all these subdivisions and all you had to do is drive through a little bit and think about how many subdivisions there are in this country. We were really fortunate to be, you know, we made a printer, we tried to come along with it. We were making the right printer at the right time for that because I mean, John will tell you, I mean, we had, kind of wanted get one up on our competitors with the auto unloader and kind of snuck up on everybody with that and then the yard sign industry snuck up on us. And like John said, I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that really just took off when all your supplies are gone. And that was not, that's not the supply chain we have now. The supply chain we have now is almost like people don't wanna go back to work yet. They're still getting the government money and it's gonna take a while. They've got to cut that off to get people back to work. So we have the raw materials. That was really during COVID when it just people just started buying up all those yard stakes and all the Coroplast and everything else. It was crazy for a while there, for sure. Obviously, like you said, it was hard to predict the pandemic. So a lot of this fluctuation is going to be atypical for typical yard sign sales. In a more normal year, if we look back at maybe twenty nineteen, let's say, what role does yard signage typically play in a printing company's business model? And how would you say it fits into larger strategies around different products and different offerings? Is it a year round popular thing, or is it usually pretty niche? How do you weigh it? I feel like it's a it's a very popular item because it's a cheap, easy way to get your message out. And I mean, like like I was saying earlier about a billboard, you know, a billboard, most of those require, you know, a three, six month contract that's gonna cost you probably a couple thousand dollars a month. You you can hit that same message across town, you know, one time for a fraction of the cost, and you don't have to keep doing it over and over. You know, in a normal year, you know, we we come from a traditional screen printing background. So we do a lot of yard signs, a lot of political, a lot of real estate. And then typically, we see in the even years when it's a heavy political cycle, we'll have as much as a ten percent increase in printing just due to that political cycle. I mean, it's huge. And then you tack that on with twenty twenty, and the pandemic and all that, it made for a record year for parent printing. And then this year, we are on track for another record year just in other ways. It's not political as much this year. It's just other avenues of yard signs, like Patrick saying, the the expressing yourself like the card in your yard, you know, all the yard signs that that spell out sayings, that's still carrying forward. People are still using that. I mean, that was a big blow up last year, but I think it's an established business model now. And people are seeing it, and they're still using it. I I think that'll continue to go forward. That that's gonna continue. That that has become a product now. There's no doubt about it. It's popular. It's it's out there and and it's moving forward. And, I mean, it's heavily customizable too. Mean, I think that's the whole point. Right? Very much. Yeah. And so I think that personalization, individualization, is gonna be key, I think, for future utility for yard signs. And I think it's encouraging to see something that, you know, even though it is a cheap, quick product, compared to maybe some other printing jobs, usually when I think of yard sign production, it's usually batch orders of, you know, hundreds, if not thousands for a, you know, political campaign, let's say. Right? But the fact that now individual consumers are starting to feel like, wow, I want a personalized yard sign in my yard that, you know, makes me stand out to the HOA or something. Right? I mean, I'm just hypothesizing here a little bit. But, yeah, I think it really allows there to be some long term opportunities here for yard signs to find new avenues to stick in and then stay. So I guess with that in mind, how much of what we saw during COVID do you think is going to be long term? Which of those avenues are gonna continue to maybe see some of those fluctuating spikes like you were describing, John? And then which of them might just be, you know, a last year special and something that'll even out moving forward? I think it's definitely you saw a big uptick. I don't think it'll be like it was in twenty twenty. But I think like the like I said, the the expressing yourself and yard signs in your yard, I mean, you even see them as far as we support military. We we back blue. I mean, for any kind of movement, people are seeing that now as a as a good way to put a, I guess, a message out there. That'll continue to go forward. As far as high school graduations and, you know, we're we're still open. Obviously, I think I think the high school graduation thing will stick around for a few years and the we're open. I think that's gonna trickle away. But I think you're gonna see increase in growth still in yard signs. There's there's more ways to express yourself now, and people are seeing that, and and they're investing in it. Right. Now, population is growing too. Yeah. Mean, it can only go one direction. And and like I said, I I I think that COVID definitely, it was a surprise at how popular yard signs became. That was a political, it's important to point out that was a political year too. But as the political years get even, you know, television's not as popular, there's a lot of other things. I mean, and getting the political message out there every two years, it just seems like it's gonna be a heated race and the political part of it's gonna come out. The cool thing about it with yard signs is that, you know, a lot of people have this dream of producing yard signs for the whole world, whole country or something. These are rigid pieces of material that require shipping and a lot of the political campaigns, they do like to buy local. It's very popular for them to buy local. So it regionalizes really well for the smaller sign shops, not those big conglomerates out there where you have four to six people and you equip them with something where they can put five hundred yard signs out an hour. You know, I think what are you doing, John, like five forty or something like that and you do five forty yards. I mean, now you're competing into screen printing. Now screen printing can do, you know, you really don't wanna have a screen print department when it only makes sense to do one single color applications. So, I mean, you're equipping these smaller companies to go out after this high volume business, that's a pretty simple business but if they can hit those numbers, makes all the sense and there's no one that can compete with them. You can print six hundred boards an hour, seven hundred boards an hour on these three million dollars printers. But I mean, that's fifty thousand dollars a month plus the service contract. I mean, plus everything else. Plus you have to keep an army of these people packing these things every day. You know, you gotta pay them whether or not you got the jobs or not. So, I mean, it's a nice, what I like to call that yard sign business is a nice recession proof business. It's cheap, like John said, it's a cheap way to express yourself. People are still gonna advertise and it's not going anywhere. I tell you, and coming from screen printing, it used to be such a labor intensive process. I mean, had we had so many people here running around, you know, you had a designer, then you had a guy that was outputting film, then you had a guy who was burning screens, a guy reclaiming screens, you had an ink mixer, you had a press operator, you had a catcher in the back when they used to have to be air dried out. And I mean, now, you don't need a sink. You need one person, one good dedicated operator and a cutter. And we're putting out better quality and more volume than we've ever put out. And it's it's it's so it's driven by capital investment. You gotta have the equipment and the knowledge on how to do it. So coming from screen printing to this, what's behind me, oh, it was a no brainer. And it's made our lives easier and faster. It's it's it's been fun because it's almost made my life easier, you know, and and we've really enjoyed it. Yeah. I wanna intersect how these changing dynamic during COVID impacted your business models and sort of day to day operations. So really just kind of opening the hood a little bit and hearing a bit about how you strategize and adapted day to day during this pandemic. So, you know, feel free to give us your two perspectives. Obviously, Digitech and Parrot Printing have slightly different business models, but what did you do to react to this changing environment? And when you saw these opportunities to, you know, leap onto, yard sign printing, for example, to support your company, what did you do to strategize around that? How did you jump onto that to create some of that padding during the pandemic? Well, we got a lot of calls. Like, we we just we kinda fly under the radar a bit here. We don't do a lot of advertising. We're just I guess, by word-of-mouth and being here as long as we have, we just get a lot of calls for it. We're kinda known as the yard sign printer, I guess, in our region here. The main thing was was keeping up with the demand. You know, it was all such fast turns that came out of nowhere. And so we were putting in the extra hours where it was needed, going the extra length when it was needed, and having, you know, a good price, a good quality, and and good turnaround. And so we've really we've tried to keep all that the same and consistent going forward. You know, I mean, people really enjoyed what we were giving them, and we it it gave us an uptick in business. And so we've just kind of put that motto going forward on everything. Everything we try to turn twenty four, forty eight hours, and people keep coming back because there's not many people in the industry or locally around us that are doing that same turnaround. So it's given us an opportunity to really make a better name for ourselves. We were doing things faster and better, and now it's just it just continues to move forward. And same question to you, Patrick. How did y'all have to respond during that trying time? And Yeah. When you did see this boom in yard sign printing, did Digitech do anything to, you know, try to make sure your customers or potential customers had what they needed? You know, it's kind of, you know, we were at the beginning of last year, twenty twenty, we started out at, you know, we grew to the four to five machines a month scale. And then as soon as COVID hit, everything shut down. And then when we came back, we really didn't know what to say. Do we wanna do two machines a month, three machines a month? How do we wanna do this? What's the demand gonna be for equipment? Is anybody gonna be working? I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty. Like there's uncertainty right now too. But what we did was we used the time to kind of work on the software and work on, you know, that workflow on the front end. And, you know, thank God there was companies out there like John that, you know, not only did he trust to come over here and take a look at the printer, but he, you know, when he was here, he came in here originally to buy a slower printer, you know, which is a fine printer. It's twenty boards an hour, twenty five boards an hour. Luckily for me and luckily for him, because I really wanted him to have that region and have that kind of piece of equipment to turn to the next level that he and I, he decided to go with the faster printer. And that was a game changer for him. And a lot of these companies out there that think that, you know, you can do twenty boards an hour and whatever, you can compliment a business like that but at fifty boards an hour, you can blow the doors wide open and you can get jobs you never got before. And it really, having the John Parrotts and some of the others, you know, we mentioned Tommy Trucks on here before too and these guys out there that, you know, let us know what we need to do. And you know, if you look at now the the cue it up software like John has right now, he's doing some of the the yard expression signs now, where basically every image is different. One, one, one, one, one, one. You might do fifty or a hundred different images. We and forty. Two hundred and forty, okay, different images. It was a lot. And and that takes you so long when you have to pull another image in and and rip it or and send it to the printer one at a time. And what we did during that time is we worked on things like that. NetQ allows us to load those two forty in there and run the printer. We can print two forty images or four by eight faces in the same amount of time that we can print all the same two forty. I mean, it's basically you're putting it in production mode and you're not wasting any time and that saves, you know, he said two forty, okay, two forty, he's saving forty five minutes for every one hundred sheets that he puts through that printer. I mean, did a lot of those things to make it more efficient and I think we put ourselves in a right position to be the next big thing and I hope we are. Yeah, the the Q software really changed the game for us because, you know, every four by eight image you have, it's got letters in it, you know, and it's every single room is a custom letter, custom colors. And so the cat the catalogs for our customers, there's so many images. It it would take forever to go back every single time, queue it up, print it, queue it up, print it. I mean, now you just feed it like it's a nonstop same job over and over. The only headache now is the the poor guy running the cutter. He's he's gotta put it all together. You know, hopefully, on the cutting side, our our vendor will put some kind of software together for something like that. But, that's made life so easy. It really has. Daniel, we've sold a lot. Our printer is selling a lot of cutters out there. You get that printer, you're gonna have another cutter or you're gonna upgrade cutter. Something's gonna happen. So Yeah. You gotta be able to match that horsepower, that output. Yeah. There's more there's more to printing. You have to you have to finish and then you have to pack it and everything else. So Right. Yeah. Sounds easier than others. Yep. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Well, really what I wanna do now is actually take that last point of the wider ecosystem of hardware and processes that support printing and more specifically yard signage and basically look ahead a little bit. I've kind of already heard this from both of you, but basically, yard decorations and yard signs had a place in the industry pre COVID. And now that we are in sort of a post COVID world, we might not see the same huge boom that we saw in twenty twenty, but yard signs aren't losing relevance. If anything, they've found new markets to find at least a steady market to, you know, to latch onto. So with that in mind, how should printing companies strategize around this new market? What should they be prioritizing and how can they maximize this sort of reinvigorated yard sign side of the industry to play into a larger, process for their business or a business model as well? Well, I think it it it really comes down to equipment. Without equipment, you can't play ball, you know, that's just but I mean, also, there's the oldest, the chicken or the egg come first. You have to have the business first, then get the equipment. And that's kind of for each business owner to decide, you know, that's up to them. But without the right equipment, you're never going to play ball. You got to have an established name out there. You know, and you got to be able to turn quality product. And I think that all comes down to equipment. Thank God we paired up with Digitech. It's increased our quality and our speeds. It's reduced our operating costs, which has been great. So it trickles down to the bottom line, hopefully to reinvest in another one. So I mean, it comes down to if that's the realm you want to get into, yard signs. I mean, what we did as a business, you know, you you we for many years, if it was full color, we we subcontracted stuff out until it grew, and it boomed where we were like, hey, we've got enough business to where we need to bring that operation in house. Once we did that, we quickly saw how fast it was growing. It just just snowballed from there to where we are now. And it's been, I guess we've been in the flatbed industry a little about ten years now and it's been an incredible ride. It's just grown so fast. I think that I mean to add to what John just said there, you know, we were lucky. Mean, time will tell whether or not yard signs will really do what John and I are saying they're gonna do but we were lucky to, you know, kind of be in the right place at the right time. We were working on a very high adhesion ink for another very large customer of ours. And it just kind of fell into place where we were working on that at the same time with some of our other customers to try to get the best adhesion and the best durability out of the product. And then COVID hit and yard signs came and we were, you know, that if you're gonna print a yard sign and you're gonna reuse it like a real estate guy does or yard expressions do where they rent them out and they put them back in the car, you want the durability and we had that and you know, we had customers, we had some of these, especially the smaller franchises out there seeking us out because they wanted seeking our customers out, you know, John, you got some experience with that. Just trying to find somebody that had the same printer that had that ink set on there and could match that quality on there. And we were very fortunate to be there and hopefully it continues and we can help some other customers be successful and be successful ourselves in the process. Yep, that's something I will add on to. That's one thing I can't express enough. When we bought our first machine, we had a lot of adhesion issues. And you you don't think that that's that big of a deal until you've printed a massive job on whether it's corrugated or whatever. But corrugated is a very tricky application to print to. And stuff starts coming back. Hey, my ink's falling off. It's flaking, this and that. That is huge. You've gotta have a good ink. These guys have got it. That was a huge selling point to me. I mean, just do your homework, check the check the ink, make sure it bites good. That's a huge thing. And go see Digitech. Go see Digitech. I love it. On that note, I don't think I could have wrapped it up anymore perfectly. So we're gonna go ahead and call it for this live episode of the show. Thank you so much to both of you for rejoining us. It's been a pleasure chatting again and hearing nothing but positive things. I mean, John, it's great to hear that the true fire has been kicking butt for you over the last eight months and now pushing up a total year of having one in house. And Patrick, great to hear that, Digitech has been able to pivot and support its customers during this trying time. So with all of that being said, we'll wrap up the show today. So thank you again to our two guests, Patrick Caldaway, founder and president of Digitech, and also to John Parrott, vice president at Parrott Printing. John, if folks want to get in touch with Parrott, potentially source, some of your printing services? How can they learn more? How can they get in touch? Parrot printing dot com. Parrot spelled with two r's and two t's. Our our eight hundred number is eight hundred three two five seven one four five. Definitely give us a call. I'd be happy to help anybody out. Perfect. Easy enough. And Patrick, if folks wanna find out a little bit more about how Digitech is supporting some potentially new opportunities in the yard signage side of the industry, how can they learn more? How can they get in touch? Digitechusa dot com. We're adding more to our website all the time. We've got some cool information about automation and the Q software on there that's available. Customers love it. Just if you're in the market, come see us. Love it. Patrick, John, thanks to the both of you. It's been great. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Yep. And thank you everyone for joining us on another episode of the show. This has been another episode of Print Precision, a Digitech podcast. If you like what you heard and saw and want some more episodes, head to our website, digitechusa dot com for a full catalog of all of our video interviews. If you want some audio versions of the podcast, you can also find those on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Print Precision.