Grocery Stores, Site Visits, and Splinters: Inside a Busy Week at Leaman Signs | Vlog #001

Some weeks at a sign shop are defined by one big project. Other weeks, you're pulling off three things at once across multiple job sites while also trying to get a splinter out from under someone's fingernail. Welcome to Episode 001 of Life at Leaman Signs.

Three Grocery Stores in One Year

The biggest story this week is a pair of simultaneous interior sign package installs — and they're both grocery stores. The team is wrapping up a full interior package for Sobeys on Topsail Road, with one day left and just a few finishing touches to go. At the same time, a separate crew is getting started on No Frills at Village Mall, figuring out what's there and laying the groundwork for a full interior package.

What makes this notable: No Frills and Dominion share the same manufacturer. Earlier in the year, Leaman Signs completed a full Dominion rebrand. So this No Frills job is the third grocery store interior package the company has done in a single year — a solid run of work in a specialized niche.

Interior retail installs like these are more involved than they look from the outside. This week's Sobeys job included installing cooler fascia — the framing system that wraps around refrigerated cooler units to create a flat, finished surface for graphics. Different cooler styles have different face profiles, so the fascia has to be adapted accordingly. On top of that, the crew wrapped walls, installed hanging aisle signs, put up the black band running through the white sections, and handled a long list of finishing elements throughout the store. It's detailed, physical work that takes a well-coordinated crew to execute cleanly.

When the Shipped Parts Don't Show Up Right

One of the consistent realities of this kind of work is that Leaman Signs doesn't fabricate the retail sign systems themselves — they're manufactured elsewhere and shipped in. The company's role is strictly labor and installation. That means when something shows up wrong, the team has no control over it and has to figure out a workaround on the fly.

This week, a fabric panel arrives with the hole punched in the wrong spot — essentially upside down from how it should be installed. Rather than wait around for a replacement, the crew starts planning how to fix it on-site, with the option to take it back to the shop, lay it out, and work through a solution. It's a reminder that in construction and installation work, there's always something. The right thing doesn't always show up at the right time, or in the right orientation.

A Client Visit and a Likely New Job

In between job sites, Graham makes time for a site visit with a prospective client looking to refresh their office signage. The conversation covers a few different directions: reusing an existing sign frame that's still in great shape, potentially flipping a polycarbonate panel to save cost, adding dimensional raised letters to a waiting area wall, and incorporating a tagline — Always On. Always Learning. — at a size that would really land when you walk through the door.

It's a good example of how a site visit works in practice. Graham walks through the space, takes reference photos for quoting, talks through options, flags what can be reused versus replaced, and sets expectations on timeline — currently four to six weeks from approved proofs. By the end, it sounds like the job is as good as confirmed.

Everything Else

The week also includes a bathroom sign swap at a retail location — removing an accessibility icon from a washroom that isn't actually accessible, so people who need an accessible bathroom aren't misled. Small job, but the right thing to do. There's also a discovery of a mysterious hole in a finished panel face on-site, which immediately becomes a documentation moment before anything else.

And yes, someone gets a splinter. A deep one. The kind that requires tweezers, a steady hand, and a brief debate about whether hot water or surgery is the right approach.

The full episode is embedded above — worth a watch if you want to see what a busy week in a sign shop actually looks like, start to finish.