Sign Shop Pre-Prints 40,000 Blank Candidate Yard Signs To Beat Order Rush

WAUKESHA — Premier Sign Works, a 24-employee shop on Lake Road in Oconomowoc, has stopped waiting for candidates to tell it what to print.

Owner David Kowalski said the shop now runs 500 coroplast blanks a week with the candidate line left empty, a rectangle of white space where a name and a vague adjective like "PROVEN" or "READY" will eventually go. When an order comes in, a staffer feeds the blank through a second pass on the UV flatbed, drops in the name in 72-point Impact, and the sign is boxed within two hours.

"We used to quote ten business days," Kowalski said. "Now it's two. Sometimes same day if the name's short. 'Voss' prints faster than 'Vukmirovich.'"

40,000 Blanks And Counting

Kowalski projects the shop will produce 65,000 signs total before Election Day, and he expects roughly 40,000 of them, about 62 percent, to start life as unnamed inventory. The blanks are sorted into bins by category: statewide office, state legislature, county board, and a fourth bin labeled simply "LOCAL / UNKNOWN" for races the shop hasn't identified yet.

The shop's production manager, Renata Oslowski, 34, keeps a laminated chart taped above the flatbed tracking how many blanks remain in each bin. She said the state legislature bin empties fastest because there are more seats to fill and campaigns tend to order in batches of 250.

"Governor bin barely moves because there's only so many governor candidates," Oslowski said. "The legislature bin, we've refilled that four times since August."

A Bet On Demand, Not A Specific Candidate

Kowalski said the strategy started as a way to stop losing rush orders to a competitor in Waukesha, Signcrafters of Wisconsin, which he said has quoted faster turnaround on smaller runs. Pre-printing blanks, he said, lets Premier compete on speed without actually guessing who's going to win anything.

"We're basically betting that every candidate in Wisconsin wants a sign," Kowalski said. "That's a safe bet. Nobody runs for office and says no thanks on the yard signs."

The approach does carry risk on the font side. Early in the cycle, the shop committed to a single house font, a condensed sans called Interstate Bold, for every blank, on the theory that it reads fine at 45 miles per hour regardless of candidate. Kowalski said one campaign manager who'd specified a different font threatened to cancel a 1,200-sign order over it before agreeing the issue wasn't worth re-running the batch.

Storage Becomes The Bottleneck

With 40,000 blanks moving through the shop, storage has become the real constraint, not printing capacity. Premier Sign Works rents a 3,200-square-foot overflow unit two miles from the shop and runs a box truck between the two locations three times a day during peak weeks.

Kowalski said the shop leans on the same folding hand truck (paid link) its two forklift operators already owned personally before buying three more for the warehouse route, after the originals kept disappearing between buildings.

Any blanks left unsold by the Wednesday after the election get reclassified as "spring," Kowalski said, meaning they'll resurface for county board and school board races next year with a fresh coat of white vinyl over whatever got printed on them in the meantime.

"Nothing in this building ever really goes away," Kowalski said. "It just waits for a name."