La Boulange Bakery approached Martin Sign Company about taking a couple stainless steel catering carts and covering it in La Boulange branded digital graphics. The benefit to branding the catering cart is that anytime La Boulange catering gets a call to deliver a wide variety of pastries to any of their downtown San Francisco clients the catering delivery guy will be pushing a cart covered with branding from La Boulange. The branding is clean and brightly colored. These bright colors will pop in contrast to the dark neutral colors of the high rise buildings that line the downtown streets. With everyone looking at the carts they will no doubt want these awesome catering carts to show up their office.
Street vendors, bakeries, and farmers market vendors can all take this type of branding to heart. If you have a booth at a farmers market its important that your signs are clean, colorful and well designed so that you stand a part from the crowd. A well designed sign program although small, can demand that your product sell for more. If your signs lack a professional look then people will expect to pay less for the product that you are selling.
Many street vendor stands and carts are small so there is not a lot of space for signs. So here are some hints and tricks that we’ve been helping other street warriors with.
Make a Small A-Frame
This sign doesn’t have to be huge. It can just be 2′ tall and 1′ wide. I’ve seen these for food trucks and some small hot dog stands. This small sign might have a special of the day, or just have a arrow on it pointing people in the direction where to buy the food. If you sell tomatos at the farmers market you might use the a-frame to brag about something fantastic about your tomatoes like how they were picked that morning.
Digital Banners
Banners are very flexible cost effective sign that you can hang in the back of the pop-up tent. Not only can the banner serve to provide shade when the sun is coming up or is setting, but you can have your logo, your website, phone number or information about your company so people can grab it if they want to. I’m a big fan of just having a logo. Spend a $1000 and hire a graphic designer to get a great looking logo. Then put that logo on everything and watch people fall in love with your brand. The logo should be the biggest thing on the banner.
Table Drapes
If you don’t have metal catering cart like La Boulange or a hot dog stand, and all you are stuck with is a table. You can hang a banner on the table or better yet, have an entire table drape made with your logo on it. Table drapes allow you to brand your stand at the farmers market but also you can hide boxes and ugly set up stuff under the table. Like all these signs table drapes are easy to set up and easy to store between events.
The great thing about signs is that there are so many solutions. With such a variety in possibilites, this is why its important that you work closely with a design team that has a graphic designer and a sign professional to help you through the best solutions. At Martin Sign Company we can consult on the best sign solutions for your Pop-up tent, street food stand, food truck or catering cart needs. And if you don’t know a graphic designer, we work with many talented graphic designers who we can refer you to.
