SPAR

The programme

SPAR is not one project. It is a continuous national signage programme covering more than 700 stores, and we handle all of it.

Work arrives for a number of reasons: a new retailer joins the SPAR symbol group, an existing retailer leaves and the store has to be rebranded, a shopfit is upgraded, or signage is damaged by vandalism and needs replacing. The bulk of it is new fit-outs and new stores. Locations run from Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham through to Newcastle, Carlisle, Hull, Preston, Sunderland, London, Bowness-on-Windermere and Kirkby Lonsdale, and a great many more besides.

Every job is produced to SPAR’s brand guidelines, with colour matched to RAL references. Whichever store you walk into, the signage has to look like the same brand, made to the same standard.

The constraint that shaped the programme

Most of these stores are trading while we work on them.

A grocery store cannot close for a signage installation. That means every survey, delivery and installation is planned around a shop that is open, serving customers and taking deliveries of its own. Access constraints are the norm rather than the exception: work at height, road or lane closures, and public walkways that have to stay open and safe.

The other fixed point is the date. New stores have a set opening day and set lead times, and neither moves. We plan around them.

Where advertising consent is required, we handle the application. Installation access and materials are agreed and signed off with store or landlord management before we arrive on site, which is what keeps a one-week turnaround achievable on smaller sites and prevents a four-to-six week new build programme from unravelling in its final week.

What a store takes

A new store typically needs 7+ external signs and 20+ internal signs in a single installation:

• Aluminium fascia signs with acrylic and vinyl lettering, LED illuminated (a site may carry anywhere from one to eleven of these)
• Full colour window prints across every window
• Bulkhead signage throughout the store, in flat cut lettering and digital print
• Grab & Go sections: powder-coated aluminium cladding to the bulkhead across the coffee and cake areas
• LED neon for Grab & Go
• Totems and monoliths, aluminium composite trays, wayfinding, built up lettering, flex face and illuminated shop signs as the site requires

Technical specification

The result

Delivered on time, consistently, across a 700-site estate, in stores that stayed open throughout.

The scale is the point. Running a signage programme at this size means the same brand standard has to survive hundreds of different buildings, frontages, landlords and opening dates. It only works if survey, design, manufacture and installation sit with one supplier who already knows the brand guidelines and doesn’t need to relearn them each time.