Flying High with New Maggie McFly’s Location
FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., created interior and exterior signage for Maggie McFly’s ninth location at Albany’s Crossgates Mall.
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is typically known for horse racing (and relentless construction), but FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs worked with an aviation theme for a recent project—one which won the six-year-old franchise the Grand Prize at the Wide Format & Signage/FASTSIGNS Awards, held during the annual FASTSIGNS International Convention in Phoenix, Ariz., Jan. 15–18, 2020.
Thirty miles south of Saratoga, just outside Albany, is Crossgates Mall, the Capital District’s premier shopping center. Craft eatery and bar Maggie McFly’s was opening its ninth location at Crossgates—its first in New York State—and tapped FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs to create the interior and exterior signage, including backlit acrylic channel letters with copper-colored vinyl, as well as ADA signs for the restrooms, frosted vinyl on the front door that matched the painted logo on the exterior of the building, interior artwork with French cleats and acrylic surfaces, and, on the exterior, a 14-foot illuminated ring on the outside of the building, along with a 110-foot sign band that wraps the exterior. Four sets of reverse halo signs promote Maggie McFly’s catchphrase: “LOCAL, CRAFT, EATERY AND BAR”—all with matching painted copper.
Early in the process, the FASTSIGNS team, working with materials spec’d by the project’s architect, discovered that the vinyl that covered the LED-lit translucent acrylic channel letters had a tendency to change color under different kinds of lighting. A specific shade of copper is part of Maggie McFly’s branding, but at night, the letters changed color.
“We had asked them, ‘Do you really want this vinyl on these channel letters, because it’s a weird color that, when it gets illuminated, it changes dramatically,’” said Rick Bult, owner of FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs. “This was a metallic copper that when it was illuminated, it went to kind of a manila folder shade of yellow, not even remotely close to copper. It looked great during the day, but looked terrible at night.”
The architect had said that they had the same issue at a previous installation the year before, but hadn’t come up with a solution.
“We started playing around with different vinyls, different acrylics, different polycarbonates,” Bult said.
They created four options, lit them and ultimately chose one that kept the same color characteristics regardless of lighting.
“We found a cast wrapping vinyl that you’d use on a vehicle that was thin enough to let light through and didn’t change color a whole lot from day to night.”
Exterior lettering required experimenting with different vinyls as the original specified material changed color heinously under different lighting conditions. FASTSIGNS also worked with an outside vendor to help produce the custom 14-foot-diameter illuminated ring on the building.
The architect was impressed.
“He said, ‘We don’t know how you did it, but it looks great.’ At that point he said, ‘We’ve got some interior artwork. Do you want to work on that too?’ We said sure.”
This interior artwork consisted of a number of images, but no real indication of what to do with them.
“I sent him some samples of what I thought would look good, and I said we can do it with a hidden French cleat so you don’t see any hardware at all.”
They liked the idea—and in fact plan to reuse it for the next Maggie McFly’s location currently under construction in Connecticut.
“They’ve even expanded on the artwork,” Bult said. “They liked it that much that they just sort of went to town with that effect.”
The same architect is designing the new location—and, thanks to the success of the Crossgates installation, FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs will also be installing its signage as well.
“It’s all the same pieces, just put on the walls a different way,” Bult said, “and any hurdles that we ran into we’re already well aware of.”
Interior artwork consisted of a variety of images mounted to the wall using a French cleat.
The installation time for the whole project was, on net, about seven working days staggered over a two-month period.
“You’re juggling with a lot of other general contractors that are all still there,” Bult said. “People doing tile work, painting, doing electrical work.”
As a result, it’s important to stay in constant communication with the general contractor to ensure that everything is still on schedule, so they don’t go down to install signage and the tiling work is still not done.
Rest room signage comprised ADA-compliant wall signs, as well as “M” and “W” icons using the Maggie McFly’s typeface.
FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs got the Maggie McFly’s project in the first place the same way it gets a lot of signage work for new constructions: via a lead-generation service called CDC News (www.cdcnews.com), which monitors all the building permits being issued and going through planning board meetings. It then sends out daily updates of any construction projects planned for a given geographic area. You can pick your geographic radius, and even have results sorted by keywords—such as specific kinds of signage or display graphics.
“You put in keywords that you’re looking for,” Bult said. “So ‘signage,’ ‘window films’—you can pick basically anything you want and it’ll search everything. So every day we get a separate listing for just signage.”
The listings are then given to either Bult or Crystal Wilderman, FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs’ outside sales rep, who then reaches out to the contractor in charge of the project, and starts the bidding process.
Other signage included channel letters mounted to an acrylic surface.
“That was a lead that came through just in a random email,” Bul saidt. “I called the general contractor, said I’d like to bid on that, he said OK, and we started bidding on it.”
It was then that another sign company got irked that Bult was being allowed to bid on the project. So Bult had to prove that his shop was up to the project and could do it better than the other shop. He provided the contractor some references to similar sign projects FASTSIGNS had done around the region.
“They came to our shop, looked at them, and basically took the other sign shop off their Rolodex for saying that we couldn’t do something that we actually won a national award for,” he said.
For these kinds of new construction projects, most of the work is interior and/or exterior wayfinding or directional signage, and an emphasis has to be placed on ADA-compliant signage. His production workhorse is a UV printer from Direct Color Systems (DCS), a device whose killer app is the ability to print Braille. He also recently bought a 24 x 40-inch laser for cutting the ADA plastic, as well as a CNC machine for doing dimensional letters, as the volume of outsourcing increased to the point where it was a logical investment.
“We were heading quickly towards $2,000 to $3,000 a month in outsourcing and we were missing deadlines,” Bult said. “We purchased the machine that ended up costing us $500 a month on a lease. It dramatically turns the tables on the financial aspect of the business where now we’re spending $500 a month as opposed to $2,500 a month, and we’re getting things done more quickly.”
His choice of software also makes the estimating process quicker and more accurate than the old system of colored dots on ledger paper. To generate an estimate for signage projects, Bult starts with the architectural plans.
“We’ll pull the plans down and when we’re doing the room identification signs, we use software called Stack that lets us import PDFs into an online portal,” he said. “Then we can start going and tagging rooms and create a library of signs. We can add a symbol for a room sign, or an exit sign, or an elevator sign. We can go through and start clicking on the floor plans and tagging everything so that at the end, it’ll export an Excel file that gives you a total count for every floor that you've done. At that point, you can assign sizes to the signs, and square-inch pricing to the signs, and basically generate an estimate.”
For the kinds of construction projects that FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs handles, Bult’s primary point of contact is the building contractor and/or architect, very rarely the end user. And he usually gets involved even before actual construction starts, so as to get a thorough knowledge of the location, where junction boxes are going to go, and to plan out the signage. Even the signage installation itself isn’t done until toward the end of the project.
Once Bult does one project for an individual contractor, that can lead to repeat business.
“They’re bidding projects every month, and they want to have their pipeline created so that as soon as the crew’s done at one location, they’re off to the next, and a lot of the larger contractors have multiple projects going on at the same time,” he said.
Other new projects that FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs is working on include window graphics—everything from security film, to color change, to even window films that reduce the amount of heat that comes into a building.
“They have a vinyl film that works the same as progressive sunglasses,” Bult said. “When the sun beats on the window, it increases the darkness of the film, and at night it goes back to being clear.”
He is also working with a company in Florida that makes metal awnings.
“If you think about what a metal awning is, it’s a big aluminum pan that’s attached to a building,” Bult said. “Well, what’s a sign? A big aluminum box attached to a building. So really, from our standpoint, it’s really no different than putting a sign on a building. The only thing is there’s no electrical involved and there may or may not be vinyl on it.”
FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs is in its sixth year and has grown to seven employees. Like a lot of other print businesses, Bult has had challenges with finding production staff.
“That's probably our biggest area of turnover,” he said. “It’s a matter of finding people that are just willing to learn. We’re really fortunate to have a great center manager who’s been with us little over four years now. We’ve also been very fortunate on the front end to have people come in who want to learn and grow with the business.”
Crystal Wilderman, for example, who has been with FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs for a little over three years, started as an administrative assistant, then progressed to office manager, then began coordinating production, then doing collections, and now outside sales.
“She’s grown with the company as the company has been growing,” he said.
Bult hopes to start adding more salespeople.
Winning the Grand Prize was a source of great pride for Bult and his team.
“That's probably one of, if not the, best awards to get because it really showcases what you can do as a center,” he said. “It motivates a lot of the other centers to go, 'I don’t think I ever would have bid on that job. It’s way beyond my capabilities.’ But when you start breaking it down piece by piece, it’s not. Yeah, you’ve got to have a few people and you’ve just got to be able to think about what you’re doing and schedule it all out. But it’s not that difficult to screw a box into a building and it’s not that difficult to attach letters to a box. You need to know what hardware you’re using and what the building’s made out of. You need to have some preparation, but for the most part, they can all do that. So to get that award and to showcase what we do I think is huge kudos to us.”
