Back in 1980, partners Robert Whitehead and Bill Pyter started Olympic Signs in a two-car garage that they leased from a golf range. With just a pick-up truck and a hand-crank Skyhook Junior crane, they started out by lettering and hand-painting signs.
Fast forward thirty-five-plus years later and Olympic Signs has come a long way from its humble beginnings.
The now full-service sign company has about forty employees, a fleet of nearly fifteen service vehicles, and a slew of equipment ranging from printers to welders to vinyl cutters—all of which is housed in the company’s 30,000-square-foot building.
Just as Olympic Signs has grown, so too has its sign projects. Not just in size and scope, but also in height—the sign shop is often called on to do all types of high-rise work.
In fact, Olympic Signs recently completed work on the One Prudential Plaza building in downtown Chicago where they converted the neon letters spelling out “Prudential” to an Allanson RGB LED color-changing system.
The job required them to also change out the letters’ face panels. White polycarbonate sheets were printed out-of-house with a perforated pattern. During the day, the sheets appear blue, but at night, they can be lit to appear as any color with the LED color-changing system.
“This one was a huge project. It probably took us a month-and-a-half to finish,” says Robert Whitehead, president of Olympic Signs. “It’s a high-profile job, but that’s what we’ve grown up to.”
Another high-profile job was The Drake Hotel in Chicago. The hotel wanted to change out the exposed pink neon on its nine-foot-tall letters to LED.
Unfortunately there is no LED color that matches The Drake’s iconic pink, so Olympic Signs came up with another solution. They had SloanLED’s LEDStripe rigid tubing system in white bent into the letter shapes. They then heat-gunned translucent pink 3M vinyl to the LED so that it glowed pink when lit.
“It came out tremendous,” says Whitehead. “That was probably one of our greatest accomplishments.”
Aside from signage, Olympic Signs makes sure its fleet of service vehicles is kept busy by taking on side jobs, as well. The shop handles a number of high-rise needs for the Chicagoland area, such as hanging Christmas lights and high-rise repairs on things like broken building windows. In addition, the shop has made a name for itself by being on call 24/7.
“I think service has been key to our growth,” says Whitehead. “They call, we jump, and we’re able to keep our customer base because of that service.”
By Ashley Bray
Photos: Olympic Signs.
