SF Landmark Enters Soft Signage Market with Integrated EFI Solution

SF Landmark installed an EFI (Booth 1501) VUTek FabriVU 340 dye-sublimation to produce high quality soft signage.

San Francisco signage and graphics company SF Landmark is meeting surging demand for textile-printed soft signage with the installation of an EFI (Booth 1501) VUTek FabriVU 340 dye-sublimation printer equipped with an EFI Fiery proServer digital front end. With production speeds of up to 5,381 sqft/hour and print widths of up to 133 inches wide, the printer uses genuine EFI water- based CMYK dispersed dye inks combined with ultra-high resolution four-color printing. Founded in 1982 with annual revenues of about $1 million and five employees, SF Landmark has built a reputation for high quality, fast turn superwide format printing among event planners, brands and agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

An ‘Impressive Offering’
While researching the soft signage market, SF Landmark General Manager Bill Stender attended the 2016 SGIA Expo, followed by a visit to EFI’s users’ group conference, Connect. “I was very impressed with what EFI had to offer,” he says.

EFI developed its new VUTEk FabriVU series using EFI Reggiani’s technology knowledge base. SF Landmark’s new printer offers high-resolution imaging up to 2,400 dpi and four-level grayscale printing with 4 to 18 picoliter drop sizes.

The new printer also provides greater versatility, with its ability to print on transfer paper or direct-to-fabric with the same inkset, which saves labor and machine downtime.

Growth Through e-commerce
Stender is currently focusing on production of backdrops for stages and events, but is tooling up for other products such as flags and temporary pop-up exhibits. He also invested in a sewing system for finishing printed fabric products.

SF Landmark acquired an additional facility to accommodate the printer and will be staffing that facility up as his fabric volume grows. A new web-to-print offering — EFI’s Digital StoreFront software — is part of that growth initiative.

“As we expand our product line, we will be implementing EFI’s eCommerce for Soft Signage suite of solutions powered by EFI Digital StoreFront,” Stender explains. “We like the fact that Digital StoreFront is integrated with the EFI Fiery proServer DFE for the FabriVU printer, meaning that jobs submitted online can be delivered directly to print, saving time while reducing costs, errors and overhead.”

EFI is showing its suite of offerings in soft signage production at Booth 1501.