Hand-painted signs defy the times

Firms persist in Chicago, dash off ads for groceries, eateries

CHICAGO -- Dan Kamba and Chuck Wilmarth are debating how to spell Oscar Mayer wiener.

The "i" should be before the "e," said Kamba, co-owner of Southwest Signs in Chicago, but Wilmarth, the other co-owner and Kamba's brother-in-law, wants to be sure. Brush in hand and bent over a 4-by-8-foot sign advertising the hot dogs, he has to be.

There are no erasers in the hand-painted sign business. Each mistake is lost money and, sometimes more importantly, lost time.

As the grocery stores and food stands that once relied heavily on the signs for their daily deals have turned to printed signs, businesses that specialized in the craft have been shuttered or been forced to diversify.

Sprinkled throughout Chicago, though, the art persists, through nostalgia or necessity. The hand-painted signs, written cleanly but quickly on bright paper, are hung briefly in windows of the city's hot dog stands, fish shops and grocery stores. The inexpensive signs can be a lifeblood for some small independent shops that still rely on the advertisements.

"Even a little mom-and-pop store that doesn't have any money can still advertise," said Carol Kamba, front desk manager at Southwest Signs. "And sometimes that little sign will pay for itself 10 times over."

The stores order signs just a day or two before a sale begins.

"They all wait until the last minute to order the signs because they're all trying to beat each others' prices," Dan Kamba said. Sometimes they'll fork out another $30 or $40 for a new sign "just to make it 1 cent less."

So the sign painters are sworn to secrecy to ensure that none of their clients' competitors catch wind of a sale. And they must work fast.

Wilmarth is used to the speed. He paints the bold block letters and numbers with a style he learned as a teenager from the shop's previous owner. It's known as Chicago style, Wilmarth said, with its distinctive purplish-blue, bright red, and chartreuse or chrome yellow, and customers around the country have requested it.

With red and purple paint on the pads of his fingers, he paints one sign after the other -- one for strawberries, another for lettuce -- talking while he works.

"When the car's driving down the street at 30 mph, what do you want to know? My wife always wants to know what's on sale," Wilmarth said. "We really try to think about the layout of the signs and have the key words pop and the price pop.

"Grocery stores want knee-jerk reaction."

The paper signs start at less than $10 and go up from there depending on the size and how much the customer wants on it, Carol Kamba said. Today, hand-painted signs constitute about 20 percent of the shop's business.

They are called knock-out signs, said Ches Perry, lead sign painter and mural artist at Right Way Signs, as he paints three paper advertisements at once for the Fish Keg restaurant in the city's West Rogers Park neighborhood.

For much of his career, Perry owned a sign-painting shop outside the city. In the 1980s and '90s, before the computer took over and when hand-painted signs were more prevalent, he'd spend a 12-hour day each week painting paper signs for grocery stores. Typically, he said, the stores would call in their sign orders on Wednesday, and he'd paint them Thursday and deliver them Friday morning, when the sales usually started.

The sign shop, based in Chicago's Logan Square area, did about $1.3 million in revenue in 2016. Small signs and grocery store signs made up 10 percent to 15 percent of that. Perry spends much of his time painting larger-than-life logos or murals in restaurants or on buildings.

The Fish Keg has been using Perry's hand-painted signs since he owned his suburban shop, manager Monty Williamson said. Perry also paints the eatery's menu signs and has done murals on its walls.

The signs are quick and can keep up with the ever-changing fish specials, Williamson said. And in a world where computer-generated signs now dominate, the hand-painted versions are better at catching the eyes of passers-by.

"It's amazing how they draw people in. ... It gives you a warmer feeling," he said. "I guess it's almost like, do you want a frozen TV dinner, or do you want your ma's home-baked?"

Business on 06/08/2017

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