The Sign Above the Building Reads "COFFEE"
Happy Saturday y'all, after a few hours of driving around to banks and UPS stores I'm at a cafe, listening to the 2020 Yves Tumor album and drinking an iced vanilla oat milk latte. In a much better mood, should never have slept on Yves. Plus this shop Brass Tacks is playing skate videos on a flat screen again which always make me happy. they haven't had these in months!
So this week I got insurance on lock, i got a line of business credit on lock, i've got some sign proposals lined up for above the building and out on the highway. Progress.
still can't actually enter the building because they're working on some HVAC fixes, which I super appreciate but it's another week I'm at a standstill. thankfully the property manager was cool with me reaching out to sign contractors. I was fortunate to find the exact guy who did the last tenants sign here and he waived inspection fees. he's also been great to work with generally.
The sign above the building is just going to say "COFFEE"
The first time I saw this and it looked good was on the side of the building "High Five Coffee" in North Carolina. This spot rules. They do new Barista-designed specials all the time with crazy ingredients, even bringing in collabs on stuff they wouldn't normally carry to make it happen. they have a transparent training program and a farmland aesthetic. makes my heart sing. anyways check out this building graphic. I love it. and it just says "coffee". I was like "woah you can do that???"
It got me thinking, It doesn't matter if you have dope aesthetics if you can't find your audience. My mom was the first to say "how are people going to know tetherball is a coffee shop." referring to the name. So I've made it no small mission to make that happen. I want people driving by to know it's coffee, and from there let the place speak for itself.
And we're not the only industry doing this, a lot of shops that exist to fill a roll will use this idea to get a foot in the door. A tattoo shop sign may just say "tattoo" and get a ton of walk ins. but for most repeat customers, the people working there are incredibly important once they check it out.
To a lesser extent, plenty of Chinese food or pizza places have the same name and will get me in the door once that way, because I'm nearby and can quickly recognize that's what's up. i'm grabbing food. the same goes for coffee.
Here are a few of the designs we tried out
So we're part of a shopping center, meaning we have a rectangular spot on the highway sign, originally we were thinking of going with a white background, but that posed two problems. First it blended in with many of the other signs. Especially those that had clearly withered away as the weather got to them. Second the pink all looked like white, so with such a thin outline you could barely read it from a distance. The strong blue is truer to our aesthetics and looks great.
To maintain our appearance as it aged, and be spotted from farther away we settled on the dark blue with pink lettering for the highway.
For above the building we stuck with the original design, I like this one for a few reasons. Mainly it matches it's neighbors, I didn't want to go boxy in this location and stand out in a negative way. I'm sure the 3d lettering will help the blue outline pop.
Plus our logo really stands out in this one, more so once it's backlit. The ball on a string or pole here is also a really cool way to allude to our name. we'll likely have a vinyl "tetherball" on the windows in front.
All this said, we're still pending approval from the land manager! so who knows, but this is the plan.
Once these go up i'll be transparent about exactly where we are, right now I'm playing coy. I don't want to make anyone feel like this is happening sooner than it is haha, I still don't have the keys! But it's coming along, thanks for reading and have a great weekend everyone ✌
- Elias
