Roland DGA Talks State of the Industry with Facebook Live Video

On Tuesday, April 28, Roland DGA kicked off the week’s Facebook Live Shop Talk: Applications Edition series with an overview of the current state of the industry, and where print service providers should be putting their time and attention right now.

Product Manager Daniel Valade noted that while Roland’s staff — like much of the rest of the country right now — is working from home, they have been reaching out to customers and getting the pulse of where the industry is right now. Valade noted that one of the biggest perceptions right now is that there is an overall lack of print work.

“The reason I say this is a perception is that there are hundreds of thousands of essential businesses out there requiring daily signage,” he said. He noted, for example, that there are more than 40,000 supermarkets in the United States still open for business, more than 7,000 hospitals, more than 150,000 convenience stores, and more than 250,000 fast food restaurants with drive-thru operations still open. And all of these, he pointed out, need graphics, with some of them changing daily as the situation rapidly changes.

For example, he noted that at his own local 7-11 convenience store, one day there was a sign on the door noting that the business was open, and urging consumers to practice social distancing. The next, a new sign was up, letting customers know that masks were now required. While some of this signage is being produced on desktop printers in the store itself right now with very little guidance of a local or federal level for this type of signage, Valade believes that will change very soon.

We Are All Looking Down

One application in particular that Valade sees as a strong opportunity for all PSPs right now is floor graphics. He gave the example of super markets, which, when COVID-19 measures first started to go into action, were using hundreds of pieces of tape on the floor to designate where customers should stand in line to maintain social distancing. Now, however, he is seeing them start to transition into full vinyl signage, and not just around the cash registers, but even for measures such as making aisles one-way, and using floor graphics as wayfinding and directional signage to guide customers through the store as safely as possible.

“Another thing we’re seeing on the floor,” he noted, “is that the folks in marketing are doing more advertising graphics mixed in with the floor graphics.” He noted that as more people are paying more attention to the signage on the ground, it makes sense to start including more advertising there as well.

Floor graphics will be the focus of the session on Wednesday, April 29, at 10am PDT, which will go into more detail on this specific segment.