How To Rock Archi­tec­tur­al Sig­nage for 30 Years

Head­quar­tered in Grin­nell, Iowa we have ser­viced the archi­tec­tur­al sign indus­try for over 30 years. Over that time we’ve worked with many great peo­ple and cre­at­ed some of the best archi­tec­tur­al sig­nage across Iowa, Illi­nois, Nebras­ka, Col­orado and Wyoming.

The last 30 years have been a jour­ney and today we have 100 employ­ees who work out of our 50,000 sq ft, state-of-the-art facil­i­ty in Grin­nell, IA with six satel­lite offices.

This is quite an achieve­ment, know­ing that my wife Dianne and I start­ed in the base­ment of a rent­ed house in 1985. At the time, we had no sales but plen­ty of vision for the com­pa­ny. Braille wasn’t required, there was no dig­i­tal and most of our signs were silkscreened.

Evo­lu­tion of Archi­tec­tur­al Sign Industry

The sign indus­try has under­gone enor­mous change over the last 30 years. When we first start­ed, you had to lay down Letraset sign let­ters opti­cal­ly on nina paper and run it with acrylic thru a ​“Rube Gold­berg” lam­i­na­tor in order to pro­vide sub­sur­face graph­ics with­out screen-printing.

Back in the mid to late ​’80s, Ger­ber intro­duced tech­nol­o­gy that was orig­i­nal­ly being used in the gar­ment indus­try but applied it to the sig­nage indus­try in the form of Sign­mak­er 2 and Sign­mak­er 4. These machines would cut vinyl let­ters in var­i­ous fonts and indi­vid­ual fonts cost $300.00 each.

So when Apple intro­duced the ​“Mac­in­tosh”, they brought the sign indus­try into the 21^st cen­tu­ry thanks to the computer’s desk­top pub­lish­ing and design capa­bil­i­ty. There was even a dot matrix print­er, which we used to pro­duce sign designs that we pre­sent­ed to clients. They and we thought the designs were innovative!

Oth­er sup­pli­ers soon intro­duced oth­er cut­ting devices that could run on either Mac or PC based soft­ware to dri­ve plot­ters, CNC routers, lasers and very sophis­ti­cat­ed dig­i­tal print­ing machines.

The intro­duc­tion and pass­ing of the ADA leg­is­la­tion dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed the land­scape of the sign indus­try espe­cial­ly when it came to pro­duc­ing inte­ri­or tac­tile and Braille sig­nage. It changed the way we man­u­fac­ture inte­ri­or sig­nage and also how we edu­cate our clients from a reg­u­la­to­ry and wayfind­ing per­spec­tive. Wayfind­ing was not even in the Sign World’s vocab­u­lary 30 years ago. Now you can earn a Mas­ters Degree in Wayfinding!

Our Jour­ney

When we first start­ed, our busi­ness plan was to be a small Mom and Pop sign shop with 5 or 6 employ­ees. Now, 30 years lat­er we are a com­pa­ny of 100 employ­ees that work out our 50,000 sq. ft. man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty, 6 sales offices that serve clients in Iowa, Nebras­ka, Illi­nois, Col­orado and Wyoming.

Cell phones, Fax machines, the Inter­net, web­sites and social media did­n’t exist 30 years ago either. We set up sales calls on rotary phones in our base­ment, at pay phones in hotel lob­bies and even at road­side parks.

Our busi­ness has now evolved from being a sup­pli­er of pri­mar­i­ly inte­ri­or sig­nage to a full ser­vice archi­tec­tur­al sig­nage com­pa­ny that pro­vides the plan­ning and design ser­vices of exte­ri­or sig­nage, dig­i­tal and elec­tron­ic sig­nage, along with donor recog­ni­tion sys­tems. We are now inter­na­tion­al in scope with busi­ness rela­tion­ships in Europe, the Mid­dle East, and Israel.

What has­n’t changed is our con­tin­ued inter­ac­tion and rela­tion­ship build­ing with the archi­tec­tur­al, design and con­struc­tion communities. 

Lat­i­tude has a long­stand­ing and rec­og­niz­able brand that is respect­ed through­out the US. We have worked hard to main­tain the brand in a pos­i­tive way in our mar­ket place by pro­vid­ing qual­i­ty prod­ucts and reli­able ser­vice. In addi­tion, we have stayed cur­rent with tech­nol­o­gy that is applic­a­ble to our indus­try. This has allowed us to pro­vide a com­plete ser­vice that includes, design, man­u­fac­tur­ing, instal­la­tion and edu­ca­tion for our clients. More­over, we have imple­ment­ed numer­ous train­ing and man­age­ment pro­grams that include SOP (Sales and Oper­a­tions Plan­ning) and Dem­ing’s the­o­ry of con­straints to help us improve our qual­i­ty and deliv­ery time.

What 30 Means

Being in busi­ness for 30 years means that for the most part, through good times and bad, we have per­se­vered, tak­en care of our cus­tomers, cham­pi­oned our employ­ees, changed with the times, respect­ed our ven­dors and stayed entre­pre­neur­ial. We are clear­ly proud of this accom­plish­ment but real­ize that it ​“Takes a Village”.