SHOP TALK

SHOP TALK WARWICK PRINTING CO., LTD., LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA

BY AMANDA BROWN

Forty-eight Panels of Vinyl on the Wall Warwick Printing solves a tricky mural install.

Warwick Printing is a fullservice printing company that offers their customers quite a stock of vinyl projects—for example, Coroplast and aluminum signs, posters, indoor/outdoor banners, vehicle wraps, floor and window graphics, decals, cut vinyl letters, sandwich boards, and, as shown here, wall murals.

Their client, South Country Co-op Liquor in Redcliff, Alberta, Canada, hired them to design, print, and install forty-eight individual wall panels that make up a mural spanning the store. As well as promoting the spirits, beer, and wine on sale, the mural added a personal touch with a “Cheers Redcliff” message.

Early on though, they knew this was going to be a bit of a challenging project. Lee Weighill, owner of Warwick Printing, explains, “The main challenge was figuring out how to reach the seventeen-foot install height with racks up against every wall without having to empty the whole store out. There was not enough space for even the smallest scissor lift or boom lift, and regular A-frame ladders would not get us close enough to the walls in the right position.”

The team overcame these problems by using scaffolding and stacking two units to get high enough. “But it was still a twentysix-inch reach to the wall, which made it a little more difficult,” says Weighill.

Installation of the forty-eight panels took around eleven hours, including the set-up and tear-down of scaffolding and having to negotiate some fragile obstacles—the bottles themselves. “It was a good day’s work; not one bottle was knocked to the floor!” says Weighill.

Before the install took place, Warwick Printing acknowledged that the choice of vinyl was going to be a key component in completing the job on time.

In total, Warwick Printing ran over 260 feet of Drytac ReTac Smooth 15 through its HP Latex 360 printer. This 6-mil white polymeric printable PVC film is coated with ReTac ultra-removable adhesive technology on one side, which helped Warwick Printing installers apply, reposition, and (when needed) remove the printed graphics from surfaces such as walls.

Based in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, Warwick Printing has evolved from mainly offset press commercial printing to more digital wide format work over the last two years. Diversifying has helped the business reach new customers and survive the difficult trading conditions of the pandemic.

“We have fared pretty well so far during COVID-19,” says Weighill. “Overall business was down significantly (as much as 65 percent in the beginning), but we have seen some major gains in our wide format and signage division during the same period. I estimate we have done more volume during the pandemic than we did in the previous year and a half.

“We saw an opportunity very early in the pandemic for signage and floor graphics and quickly created marketing materials, so we were ready when business started opening up again. We’ve used dozens of rolls of Drytac FloorTac in the last six months, at one point running our HP Latex printer day and night to print COVID-related floor graphics.”

Because of this, Weighill says his shop also picked up a lot of other vinyl business unrelated to COVID. “This, for sure, helped fill the void left in our other areas of our commercial printing,” he says.

Sign Builder Illustrated Magazine (Print ISSN 895-0555, Digital ISSN 2161-4709) (USPS#0015-805) (Canada Post Cust. #7204564; Agreement #40612608; IMEX Po Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2, Canada) is published monthly 12 times per year by Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corporation, 88 Pine St. 23rd Floor, New York, NY 10005. Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and Additional mailing offices. Prices are subject to change.

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