Nine pairs of hands

Count the people who touch a single shopfront board between the enquiry and the moment it lights up. A designer who redraws the brand mark to the right cap-height. A prepress operator who checks the bleed and the colour profile. A printer who runs the white pass. A router operator who sets the V-groove depth. A welder who squares the frame. A painter. A loader. A driver. An install lead who decides where the fixings go once he can actually see the wall.

That is nine, and it is a conservative count. It is also the answer to a question we get asked a lot, usually phrased as why does this cost what it costs.

The interesting part is not the number. It is what happens at the handovers between those nine people. Every one of them is a place where a specification can quietly drift — where a Pantone becomes “close enough”, where a 40 mm return becomes 35 mm because that is what was on the rack, where a mounting height gets decided by whoever is holding the drill.

Most signage problems are not manufacturing problems. They are handover problems. A vendor who prints in one town, fabricates in another and hires an install crew in a third has eight or nine handovers happening across three companies with no shared incentive to get any of them right.

We keep all nine on one campus in Belur Industrial Area because it is the only arrangement where a mistake at step four is caught at step five by someone who will have to walk past the person who made it. That is not a quality system anybody writes down. It works better than the ones that are.

We are hiring across most of those nine roles right now — design and prepress, print production, fabrication and welding, site installation, drivers, and project management. If you make things that go out into the real world, there is a place for you here.