It's a banner year for sign companies

All signs point to a sign war ahead on Long Island.

Sign-A-Rama of West Palm Beach, Fla., has 14 stores on the Island offering all types of signs for businesses, political campaigns or municipalities. Now, Sign-A-Rama's chief competitor in the market, Dallas-based FastSigns International, is stepping in, planning this fall to open an outlet in Westbury and then 10 to 12 more in the next year or so.

No one thinks much about signs until they need one, but signs are a multibillion industry nationwide, and at one point or another a business or a person is going to need one, good economy or not.

"We have a very aggressive growth strategy," Mark Jameson, FastSigns' senior vice president for franchise development, said in an interview last week. "We believe between Suffolk and Nassau we can have 10 to 12 stores." FastSigns has 530 stores in six countries, including 450 in the United States.

Long Island, Jameson said, is "underserved" by such stores, despite the number of Sign-A-Rama outlets here. "We see a large, untapped market," Jameson said.

The sign companies sell banners, posters, and electric and digital signs as well.

Independent sign stores are also competitors, but Jameson said FastSigns is working to sign some of them up as franchise operations.

Pete Sheehan, executive vice president in the metropolitan area for Sign-A-Rama, said the company opened its first store in Farmingdale in 1986. It now has 900 stores worldwide, including about 500 in the United States. Sheehan described Sign-A-Rama as more of a "full-service" operation.

"We dominate the area," Sheehan said. He said four of the company's Long Island stores - Farmingdale, Hicksville, Huntington and Port Jefferson - have expanded in the past year.

Is this any time to open a lot of stores? Jameson acknowledged that 2009 was a "challenging" year but said so far there has been an uptick in business. And the price of real estate is low, given the slump in that market, which is a help to FastSigns. The sign business tends to do fairly well in good and bad times, Jameson said.

"You always need to communicate with your customer," he said.