Sign Firm Lights Path To Profits

[Erik Sine]

Sign firm lights path to profits

By JOE CREWS

Business Writer

DELAND -- Daniels Wholesale Sign & Plastics is riding high on a little-noticed segment of the local economy -- offering goods and services to other businesses, which economic development types say is a vital cog in Volusia County's economic engine.

"We are a wholesale manufacturer to sign companies," said General Manager Mark Blanchette in an interview last week. "We ship nationally and internationally."

Thirty years ago in Orlando, Dan Singer started making the signs that sign contractors install for national chains and mom-and-pop businesses. As his business grew, he began having to ship the completed products to farther points in the state and elsewhere. So he moved the company to DeLand about 13 years ago to better serve his customers from Jacksonville to the Florida Keys.

"It's a more central location with easy access to all of Florida from here," Singer said in a recent interview in his fabrication shop. "It's easy access to I-95, and easy to get toGeorgia, Jacksonville, Ocala and Gainesville."

The company makes signs of all sorts -- vacuum-formed and painted plastic panels back-lit by fluorescent tubes; hand-formed neon signs, with or without a surrounding metal cabinet; individual "channel" letters, each lit up from within and lined up to spell out the name of a business; or a plain-vanilla metal cabinet with a painted plastic face.

All the work is done at Daniels' new, 30,000-square-foot facility on Patterson Avenue in the DeLand Business & Industrial Park off Old Daytona Road. The company and its 25 to 30 employees moved into that plant in mid-April, Blanchette said.

Singer said the business' success is directly related to being able to turn out completed signs in days or weeks instead of months. He designed and built production ovens that can heat plastic sheets up to 10 feet wide and 21 feet long.

As a result, workers can "pull" 70 sign faces a day from each of the two ovens, or one every seven minutes, compared with other manufacturers' 20 to 30 minutes per sign face, he said.

"It's basically why we are who we are," Singer said.

Workers are cross-trained for several different jobs on the fabrication floor, Blanchette said. "We all do what needs to be done to get the jobs out."

Until its recent move, the company has been loath to advertise, relying instead on its reputation and word-of-mouth, Blanchette and Singer said.

"Most of our business is in-state, but we did a big show in Orlando recently and we got lots of orders from out of state," Blanchette said, referring to the International Sign Association's Sign Expo. "We have a lot of national accounts. We never know from day to day what kind of job will come in."

Dale Arrington, DeLand's community development director, said companies like Daniels Sign, which offer business services, are doing well in this city.

"If you look down the street from them at Ideal Aluminum, you see the same sort of thing occurring," Arrington said in an e-mail interview. "(Ideal) supplies specialized fencing for business and residential products. It is also true of other outsource types of businesses in DeLand, such as FloMet (they do injection-molded components). . . . There are several others in the DeLand area as well."

Rick Michael, Volusia County's director of economic development, said there's a lot of interdependency among manufacturers locally.

As examples, he pointed to DeLand's skydiving industry, where Performance Designs makes parachute canopies and Relative Workshop makes the packs that hold the 'chutes.

Daniels Wholesale Sign & Plastics, with its expanded production space, is ramping up for even better things. " We're starting to hit trade shows real heavy and soliciting businesses," he said. "Our biggest expansion (so far) is out-of-state -- Hawaii, Tennessee and Nevada."

Daniels has manufactured nearly 25,000 signs since its move to DeLand, and at any given time there are 100 to 200 jobs in production, each with about 20 different tasks and each task having a number of subtasks. To get it all done, Singer will continue to work side-by-side with his employees on the fabrication floor.

"This is what I do," he said. "I've got to make sure people are trained to do their jobs, or this whole system falls apart."