Stitching Success: A Look at Soft Signage Sewing Today and Into the Future

When it comes to finishing soft signage and ensuring a clean, polished look, using a sewing machine is often one of the top solutions — a classic, one might say.

“The [sewing] process is very similar to what it would have been 20, 30, 40 years ago, which is still a fairly manual process,” says Brian Adam, president of Milwaukee-based Olympus Group.

The company, which has production facilities in Milwaukee, Denver, Las Vegas, and Orlando, Florida, has between 200 and 300 sewing machines operated by about 50 to 60 sewers, Adam says. Like with a home sewing machine, the fabric must be pushed through the machine at a consistent rate by the operator to finish whatever product they’re working on.

A few standard machine types are used for wide-format applications: an overlock machine or serger, a lock stitch machine, and a chain stitch machine.

For an operation with diverse product offerings, like the one at AMI Graphics, you need to have machines that can handle any job that comes your way.

“I think we have close to 60 sewing machines when you come down to it, and they all do different things,” says Lee Weedman, director of operations for AMI’s Ocala, Florida, location.

According to Adam, soft signage is “a growing segment,” so it is important to understand the advantages and obstacles of sewing these displays and the future outlook for sewing them.

Credit: AMI Graphics

Benefits of Sewing Soft Signage

The No. 1 benefit of finishing your soft signage with a sewing machine is that you can retain the sign’s flexible nature.

“One of the great advantages of soft signage or textiles is that they're highly flexible,” notes Cain Goettelman, president of FLS Banners in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. “You can fold them up; they're easy to store. If you're all of a sudden going to start getting creases in the hems because you have some sort of hard plastic or something that wasn't going to relax nicely, [that becomes a problem].”

Also, finishing methods such as ultrasonic and heat welding — which can’t be used on all fabrics anyway — may cause discoloration that would damage the appearance of your signage, says Goettelman. But with sewing, you can pick from “a billion different thread colors” to match the background of the fabric, making for a clean presentation.

Not only that, but soft signage lends itself to sewing, according to Weedman.

“It's easier to maneuver, easier to handle,” he says. “So let's say I have a 30-ft.-tall by 50-ft.-long print project. If that's on banner vinyl or mesh, it takes quite a few people to get that through the sewing machine.”

“And I just think it's just easier to sew all around,” he adds. “You get into mesh, and especially some of the thicker vinyls, they tend to lock up in the machine a little bit more. They wear the machines down a lot more.”

Soft signage at the 2023 Las Vegas Pro Bowl. | Credit: Olympus Group

Sew What’s The Catch?

One challenge that needs to be accounted for when sewing soft signage is the stretching of the fabric as it’s stitched, says Weedman.

“I think that's probably the most challenging part of soft signage sewing and finishing is getting the size right, because sometimes we're doing a 60-ft.-long banner but it's done in 10-ft. sections,” Weedman explains. “So we're taking a 10-ft. section that's 60 ft. long, and we're adding another section that's 60 ft. long and ten feet high, and then we're adding another section, so when you add together, your image will be off. You have to line up those words because clients don't want to see a break in the print like that.”

Another issue that comes with sewing soft signage is a double-edged sword. With the speed at which printers can now produce soft signage, a busy day may create a “bottleneck” when it gets to the sewing part of the process, Adam notes. And with shortages of skilled laborers, that backup may be exacerbated.

“The printing companies have done such a nice job of getting these presses to run so fast that to keep up with one dye-sub fabric printing press, I may need 20, 25 seamstresses just to be able to keep up with what one high-speed fabric press can output,” he says. “So it's easier to go buy another printing press than it would be to hire, overnight, 25 seamstresses in a field that there's not necessarily a lot of individuals, at least in the United States, clamoring to get into.”

Additionally, the automation being seen within printing has yet to be fully extended to sewing machines.

“There is some equipment that will largely help you sew in straight lines,” Goettelman says. “So they can take a much lower skilled operator and allow them to be efficient.

“As soon as you have to go around the corner, all bets are off,” he continues. “And by corner, I mean as soon as it's no longer a perfectly straight line that we're attempting to sew — we have to start going around this radius here — that changes. So whether it's the radiused edge on a table cover or the radiused edge on a feather flag, now you start becoming much more dependent on the skill of the operator because the machine can't really help you turn the corner.”

“For a company like us — so that's a highly customized job shop that's doing unique graphics for these trade shows and these events where it's different sizes, different shapes, different materials, different finishing techniques — there's still not a way to truly automate it,” Adam adds.

AMI Graphics Seamstress Stephanie Brooks-Hickman | Credit: AMI Graphics

Bringing Sewing Into the Future

In terms of addressing skilled labor shortages, Weedman says AMI hadn’t had all too much trouble with staffing on the sewing team — that is, until the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution? Having some of the company’s long-tenured sewers, some of whom had been there for 20 or 30 years, train brand-new employees.

“The top three sewers we have were all brought in that way,” Weedman says. “They were brought in with no sewing experience and would never have applied for a sewing job. We put out a sewing ad, and they're just like, ‘Well, I don’t sew,’ and they move on. The next week, put out an ad [for] general production help, and they go, ‘That's me.’ And they do that. And then I say, ‘OK, well, our general production help is sewing.’”

What also would help address the challenges with sewing would be an investment in more automation, especially in terms of material handling, which Goettelman says is the “next natural step.”

“You talk to why most people aren't in soft signage. It is the finishing,” he says. “And it's the reason that we are in it. We've been sewing and involved in it since the ‘70s, and we have figured out how to manage it, grow the people, and produce the product. Anybody can go out and buy a sublimation machine now with an inline heat setter and those types of things. EFI and Durst and those companies have made the barrier to entry into textiles substantially lower over the past five to seven years. But they haven’t solved the problem of how do I handle the goods and finish them?”

For Adam, automation will be vital in confronting labor shortages.

“My understanding — and, I guess, belief — is that some of the sewing automation isn't necessarily revolutionary in terms of, hey, this is going to allow you to produce stuff ten times the speed,” Adam says. “What it's going to allow you to do is either produce stuff without qualified seamstresses, without people that have a ton of experience, or with just a little less labor. So it's going to help you take the place of some of the labor shortages we may have with sewing.”

Ultimately, automation will be crucial in advancing sewing, and Weedman says that whatever automation is on the horizon will help make soft signage production more efficient.

“Now, what kind of automation could they come up with?” he says. “It doesn’t matter what they could come up with, but … I think it really comes down to the hardware.”

Credit: Olympus Group