Expand Vol. 3 No. 12

Beyond Banners: Samples that Sell

As the name of the company – Bannerville USA – implies, Bannerville’s specialty is… banners. It’s a specialty that’s steady and lucrative, and Bannerville USA does it better than just about anyone, and has been for many years.

Digital manager Russ Wierzgac has been with the company for more than 20 years and in the digital production end for about five.

Back in the day, Wierzgac hand-painted tons of banners, then applied a lot of cut vinyl embellished with trick painting techniques, and finally moved into inkjet.

“Our bread-and-butter projects are 200-300 banners that hang outside on street poles, but we’re trying to push new products to expand our business. The technology is such today, and the materials have improved so much, that it takes out a lot of the guesswork on applications we may not have tried in the past,” says Wierzgac.

Two areas that Bannerville USA has been marketing recently with some success are floor graphics and wall murals. Local schools have shown particular interest in these two product lines, as well as a number of local businesses.

Since Bannerville gets a lot of local foot traffic, the most obvious way to sell these new applications was through real-life samples. Bannerville printed a design they made up with a Mimaki JV3 on FLEXmark® V 400 F White Opaque A-109 Vinyl for Indoor Floor Surfaces, laminated with FLEXmark® OV 600 6 Mil Safari Luster PSA Overlaminate.

“We have it installed where it is so that our potential customers see it right away and so we can walk on it and test it out ourselves. We even have a dog here that walks on it regularly. We’ve had it on the floor for about two weeks, and it’s held up great,” says Wierzgac. “We purposely used a complex design with the curves and the bubbles just to see what would happen if we had an intricate design that we had to reproduce. We wanted to know whether or not the corners would peel off with the more complex design, as opposed to a simple circle or square. It works quite well and we know it will hold up because there are a lot of people who go through there, and it handles the traffic.”

For wall murals, Bannerville has installed some small on-site samples for local schools using 3M Controltac Plus Changeable Graphic Film with Comply Performance IJ3552C White. An alternative vinyl material that’s conformable to irregular surfaces like brick and concrete is FLEXmark® BILBRD™ BWV RTS White Opaque Vinyl for Rough, Textured Surfaces.

For interior wall murals, particularly for larger die-cut decals of life-size action shots for sports, Bannerville has also been experimenting with Photo Tex PSA Fabric for solvent printers (Photo Tex is also available in an aqueous-compatible version). Photo Tex’s adhesive is removable, reusable, and repositionable, so it can be re-used for the same application at some other area of the building.

“A lot of the people we’ve talked to about wall applications have expressed an interest in using wall space for directional signage, instead of having a free-standing sign,” says Wierzgac.