On the heels of preparing our Printing News and Wide Format & Signage Annual Sign Franchise Review (May issue of Printing News), the acquisition of Ferrari Color by Signs.com caught my attention. The sign and display graphics market is clearly a growth market. It’s hard to exactly quantify this market, since it spans two different NAICS categories (541850 Display/Outdoor Advertising and 339950 Sign Manufacturing), with most sign companies performing the activities described in both. In 2016, the last year for which data is available from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 100,000 people were employed in 8,206 establishments. Establishments are tilting toward the smaller size due to price/performance improvements in supporting technologies, and almost 25% of these establishments belong to a sign franchise or other network.

So it was interesting to see an over $20 million e-commerce business dedicated to signage acquire a larger bricks-and-mortar business, with a view toward migrating the business to ecommerce. Even more interesting is the long history between the two companies, including the fact that Signs.com was Ferrari’s largest customer and is actually housed in Ferrari’s Salt Lake City building under a leasing agreement.

According to Nelson James, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Signs.com, Ferrari had the foresight to secure the signs.com domain back in the late 1990s but was never able to develop the e-commerce side of its business to its full potential. The first attempt coincided with the 1998/2000 dot-com bubble—and burst. And the second attempt, unfortunately, coincided with the 2008/2009 recession.