Every Visual Marketing / Print Production team has had the conversation about versioning sign kits for their stores. The question is, when the dust settles, do they end up versioning kits at the right level?

Let’s cover some in-store lingo first:

•    ‘Sign kits’ are created to package a group of visual elements before they are sent to a store

•    ‘Versioning a sign kit’ simply means that you are customizing the visual elements being sent to a store

So, a small store would receive fewer visual elements or smaller sizes of the visual elements compared to a large store. Makes sense, right?

Most retailers are familiar with the concept of versioning signs kits, and do so to save money on their print & distribution budgets. While this seems great at first glance, the reality is that these retailers are stopping a generic store type and not building out kits at a store level based on unique profiles.

You’ll hear many reasons why sign kit versioning isn’t done at a store level; the most common one centers around the increase in costs from kit packaging vendors.  Retailers think this level of versioning will cost more because the vendor has to package specific items into a customized kit, and the cost of doing this for every store would result in a huge cost increase.

This isn’t a sound argument, as fewer items need to be packaged into customized kits compared to a single kit that is sent to all stores. On top of that, kit versions are not necessarily unique to a single store, they could apply to a set of stores with identical layouts.

The overall cost of print and distribution is reduced once kits are versioned, as there is less to print, less to pack, and less to distribute.

How is your retail organization versioning their sign kits?