“That led us to do work for the MTS Centre,” he says, referring to Winnipeg’s major arena and entertainment venue, home to the National Hockey League’s (NHL’s) Winnipeg Jets, which opened in 2004.
Another milestone year was 2013, when Signex was commissioned to create signs for Winnipeg’s new Ikea store and for Investors Group (IG) Field, a stadium built for the Canadian Football League’s (CFL’s) Winnipeg Blue Bombers. IG Field will also host the CFL’s 2015 Grey Cup and help Canada host the 2015 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup.
“We designed all of those signs in-house,” Pankratz says, “and there were more than 1,000 of them.”
A similarly large project now looms with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), scheduled to open in Winnipeg on September 20. Long in the planning, Signex will create wayfinding, tactile and braille signage for the first national museum ever to be built outside the National Capital Region. The company was pre-qualified for the project three years ago.
Spreading the word
Like many other sign shops, of course, Signex’s bread and butter are clients with larger chains of locations that all need their own signs.
“We don’t get much opportunity here in Winnipeg to land national accounts, as the work often goes wherever the client’s head office is,” Pankratz explains, “but the city is a transportation hub and we had a great run with Shoppers Drug Mart stores all across the Prairies a few years ago. We’ve also made signs for Husky Energy in the past. Our smaller clients include local credit unions.”
Winnipeg is not without its head offices, though, and one of Signex’s biggest clients today is Nygård International, which is based locally and has become one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of women’s apparel anywhere in the world, with more than 200 retail locations throughout North America.
“Not much of our work is international, but with Nygård, our signs are in New York and California,” says Pankratz.
Investors Group Field, featuring Signex’s work, will host the CFL’s 2015 Grey Cup.
The key to growth
Signex started out with just two employees and a 185.8-m2 (2,000-sf) facility. Since then, it has expanded tenfold in both senses, with 20 employees—including salespeople, designers, technicians, fabricators and installers—and, by the end of this year, more than 1,858 m2 (20,000 sf) of space.
“We’re expanding and we’re always looking for new, talented people,” says Pankratz.
The key to the company’s success, its owner says, has been its strong base of clients who can make decisions early on in projects, rather than consider signage only at the last minute.
“You can solve a lot of problems at the front end,” Pankratz says, “and there can be a lot of innovation, because you get to discuss exactly what the architect wants to see. We get to work with very solid designs and materials. Since we’re so strong in that area now, we would like to do more design-build work in the future.”
