The sign hiding in plain sight
Every customer-facing business needs some way to tell people it’s open.
It’s such a simple requirement that we rarely think about it.
A word in a window. A board by the door. A light switched on when the business opens and off when it closes.
But somewhere along the way, the OPEN sign became something most businesses stopped thinking about altogether.
And that’s interesting, because it occupies a pretty valuable position.
Before someone reads your menu, sees your interior, meets your team or decides whether your business feels right for them, there’s a much simpler question:
Are you open?
They usually don’t ask you. They look for the answer.
Which means the OPEN sign is one of those rare pieces of signage people actively seek out.
The question is whether we’ve been wasting that attention.
Before OPEN was neon
The idea of an OPEN sign obviously didn’t begin with neon.
For most of retail history, telling customers you were open meant putting the message somewhere they could see it. Paint it. Print it. Write it on a board. Stick a piece of cardboard in the window.
The message mattered more than the object carrying it.
Then neon changed the relationship between the two.
Neon gas was identified by William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898. French engineer Georges Claude later developed a practical neon tube and publicly demonstrated neon lighting at the Paris Motor Show in 1910.
By 1912, Claude had installed what’s widely recognised as the first neon advertising sign above a Paris barbershop. His US patent for illuminating by luminescent tubes followed in 1915.
Then, in 1923, neon got the story that helped turn it into a commercial phenomenon.
Los Angeles car dealer Earle C. Anthony commissioned two neon signs spelling Packard for his dealership.
Accounts of the exact price vary, although $1,250 per sign is widely repeated.
What’s much more consistent is the reaction.
People stopped to look. Traffic reportedly slowed. The intense orange-red tubes were compared to “liquid fire.”
Anthony needed a dealership sign anyway.
What he ended up with was attention.
That distinction matters.
A sign could perform its practical job and, at exactly the same time, make the business more noticeable.
By the 1930s, neon had spread through major cities, and its popularity continued through the 1950s. Diners, motels, theatres, bars and retailers used signage to do much more than identify the business.
The sign became part of the business.
It told you something about the place before you’d ever walked through the door.
Functional signage didn't have to be anonymous.
How the OPEN sign became invisible
Picture an OPEN sign today and there’s a good chance you’re imagining the same one.
Red OPEN lettering. Blue oval or swoop. Dark backing. Cord hanging down the window.
You know the one.
There’s a reason it became so common.
It’s inexpensive. It’s easy to recognise. It’s easy to buy. And it tells people exactly what they need to know.
Functionally, it works.
The problem is that it works exactly the same way for everyone.
Put it in a bakery, a bottle shop, a barber, a restaurant, a salon or a high-end boutique, and every business gives the same piece of valuable window space to essentially the same design.
The message gets through.
The business doesn’t.
The sign says OPEN.
It says nothing about who’s open.
And once the same design appears everywhere, something else happens: you stop really seeing it.
It becomes part of the visual furniture of the street.
That doesn’t make it a bad sign.
It means we’ve reduced something people actively look for to its most basic possible function.
And that’s where the missed opportunity starts.
One glance, two jobs
An OPEN sign has one non-negotiable job:
Tell people you’re open.
But that doesn’t have to be its only job.
Every person checking whether you’re open is already giving that sign their attention.
You don’t have to buy the glance.
It comes with the question.
So the OPEN sign has an opportunity to do two jobs at exactly the same moment:
Job one: tell people you’re open.
Job two: give them something worth noticing.
That second job could be as simple as making the business easier to spot. It could reinforce the personality of the place. It could make the storefront feel more considered. Or it could simply be memorable enough that someone notices a business they might otherwise have walked straight past.
The word can stay the same.
Everything else doesn’t have to.
And this isn’t an argument for sacrificing function for design.
Quite the opposite.
An OPEN sign still needs to be clear, legible and understood in a second.
But once it has done that job, colour, typography, shape and composition can do something extra.
They can make the sign belong to the business behind it.
And once you start thinking about an OPEN sign as signage, rather than simply an on/off indicator, the research around business signage becomes much more interesting.
What the signage research tells us
A 2012 FedEx Office survey of American consumers found that 76% had entered a store they’d never visited before because of its signage.
It also found that 68% had bought a product or service because a sign caught their attention, while 68% believed the quality of a business’s signage reflected the quality of its products or services.
The reverse was just as interesting.
More than half of consumers surveyed said misspelled or poorly made signs made them less willing to enter a business, while nearly 60% said the absence of signage could deter them from entering at all.
Research from the University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center looked at signage from the business side.
In its study of on-premise signage, roughly 60% of businesses that made changes to their signs reported increases in sales, transactions or profits, with the reported increases averaging around 10%.
Nearly a quarter reported hiring more staff.
And across businesses of every size, legibility was rated the most important characteristic of effective signage.
That last point is particularly relevant to the OPEN sign.
Design doesn’t replace clarity.
It gives clarity more impact.
Earlier University of San Diego research looked at 162 fast-food sites and estimated that adding one on-premise sign was associated with a 4.75% increase in annual sales.
In the study’s model, that was a greater estimated sales effect than adding 100 square feet of building space or extending trading hours by one hour each week.
Another part of the same research looked at businesses making significant changes to their building signage. Those sites recorded an average weekly sales increase of around 5%, while one lower-performing location recorded an increase of more than 15%.
Taken together, the research makes one point pretty difficult to ignore:
Signage isn’t just decoration.
When signage helps a business get seen, understood and remembered, that visibility can have real commercial value.
And that brings us back to that little sign sitting in the window.
If people are already looking at it to find out whether you’re open, why would you choose one that does nothing with their attention once it has it?
The maths on your OPEN sign
Your OPEN sign is probably one of the cheapest signs you’ll ever buy for your business.
And if better signage helps even a very small number of additional customers notice your business and walk through the door, the maths starts to get interesting.
A small OPEN sign currently starts at around $390 in our range.
So take a simple example:
1 extra customer each week
× $30 average transaction
× 52 weeks
= $1,560 in additional revenue each year
Across 10 years:
$1,560 × 10 = $15,600 in additional gross revenue
That’s 40 times the original $390 purchase price.
At a $30 average transaction, it would take just 13 additional sales to equal the original cost of the sign in gross takings.
Change the numbers to suit your own business.
Use a lower average spend. Assume one extra customer a fortnight instead of every week. Use five years instead of 10.
The interesting part is how little additional business a sign needs to influence before its original purchase price starts looking very small.
Which changes the way you might think about buying one.
The question isn’t simply:
“How much does an OPEN sign cost?”
It’s:
“If I need an OPEN sign anyway, how hard can I make that sign work for the money I’m already spending?”
The OPEN sign is due for a rethink
And that brings us back to the real problem.
Businesses haven’t stopped needing OPEN signs.
We’ve just stopped expecting very much from them.
For something sitting in such a visible position — and answering a question customers are already looking to have answered — that seems like a waste.
Because you’re not choosing between having an OPEN sign and having a piece of branding.
The same sign can do both.
It can tell someone you’re open.
It can make your business easier to notice.
It can feel like it belongs to your brand rather than every other business on the street.
And it can turn a functional purchase you probably needed anyway into a piece of signage that actually works for the business behind it.
You already need the sign.
You might as well make it work harder.
We’ve been thinking about that for a while.
And we’re currently working on doing something about it.
More on that very soon!
