You could say that sign making is in Chris Grandell’s blood. His father and grandfather started out making traffic control signs back in the 70s, and by the time Chris was six years old, he was happily running a Gerber Signmaker IV-B plotter. Now he runs the whole business, a busy FASTSIGNS shop in Blaine, Minnesota, and as he’s using PrimeCenter, Caldera’s prepress program for cutting and nesting, we caught up with him to ask how it’s going.
The Deadline Slayers
The Grandell family business became part of the FASTSIGNS family in 1998, and Chris worked for his father part-time through high school and full-time during college. Now, in addition to his team, Chris also employs his children as they work their way through school. He knew he wanted to take it over and, in November 2021, he bought his parents out of the franchise. “I’m very familiar with the sign world and I kind of enjoy watching how the industry has changed over the years,” he says.
Now he’s running a well-established sign shop that supplies customers with yard signs, decals, vehicle graphics, banners, floor graphics, interior and exterior signage, and lots more. “You name it, and we probably do it,” Chris explains. “And even for the stuff we can’t do in-house, we know some great local and national vendors that we can work with – if a project’s too large for us to fabricate or involves complex electricals.”
But do they have a specialty? Chris lights up. “You know, we pride ourselves on exceptional customer service. We try to make it as easy for our customers as we can, and we excel at meeting deadlines. Even if it’s a real tight deadline and we’ve just got a matter of hours to get the job done. We’re very good at finding out what a customer’s hard deadline is and making sure that we meet it.”
The PrimeCenter Epiphany
To get some idea of how busy this print shop is, it’s worth considering their kit. Chris reels it off: “We have a Mimaki JV33 that’s still running, we’ve got an Epson SureColor SC-S80600, we have a HP FB750 hybrid flatbed printer and we’ve just brought on a Canon Arizona 2360 GTF flatbed printer. We also have a Colex flatbed finishing table and cutter, and it was this that led us into looking at PrimeCenter.”
Chris had to admit that they’re not using Caldera RIP to drive all the printers. “But PrimeCenter nests shapes and signs so much better than our current RIP. It has an amazing ability to nest jobs together and optimize material usage, leading to great savings in both time and material. It also allows us to put marks in better places. We can do things like 18″ x 24″ corrugated plastic yard signs, and we can fill up the whole sheet and have marks just at the two ends with PrimeCenter. When we did this with our RIP, we’d have to make the marks manually, so using PrimeCenter is saving us probably 10 or 15 minutes per job – and savings like that really add up.”
Here’s an example. They were asked to produce some half-inch acrylic lettering for use in a lobby. “Laid out by hand, we probably would have used almost the entire 4×8 sheet, but using PrimeCenter to nest them, we were able to get that down to about a 16×48 inch piece. It just nested the shapes together better and took no time. In a matter of seconds, the recipe we had set up for PrimeCenter gave us the cut file. The financial savings in the material alone were a couple of hundred dollars – and that’s just on one job.”
Discovering what PrimeCenter could do for him was something of an epiphany for Chris. “I looked at PrimeCenter on a webinar by Joey Phillips, Caldera’s Workflow Specialist. I was amazed by what it could do, and how fast and versatile it is. From a nesting point of view, it made our current RIP look elementary.” Now, Chris can tie jobs together in ways that he never imagined, and it makes double-sided printing easy, with both sides lined up perfectly. “With the old RIP, doing double-sided signs was complicated and time-consuming, but with PrimeCenter, we can set up whole sheets of different designs and specify the direction in which we want to flip the sheet over, all while combining three or four different jobs. It eliminates errors and makes the process so much easier.”
A Shared Mission
One thing Caldera and FASTSIGNS have in common is an emphasis on customer service. “When we got PrimeCenter, the Caldera team was amazingly responsive and always got back to me really quickly to help me with any questions I had, and to help me work out how different features worked” says Chris.
Another thing that really impressed Chris was the free PrimeCenter trial. “I was able to use the software for real, and when a vendor will put their money where their mouth is that tells me they believe in what they’re doing. In the space of that trial, I was sold. It works with all our printers and our cutter, it works with our RIP – the way Caldera has set up PrimeCenter is pretty genius.”
And obviously, we’re not going to argue with that.
