Custom Die-Cut Stickers for North Merrick, New York

A shopkeeper standing on the pavement outside their own door is usually solving one problem: the shop name, the opening times and the two or three notices a counter is obliged to display all have to be readable from a few feet away, on glass, without turning the window into a noticeboard. Window and door decals are how that gets settled, and the people who order them arrive with a photograph of the glass on a phone and a tape measure reading.

We print and cut custom die-cut stickers to order at a single storefront at 205 East Main Street in Huntington, New York, and shop front decals for North Merrick are a steady part of that work. A storefront order behaves differently from a sticker order for a band or a laptop. The sizes are dictated by the glass rather than chosen freely, the quantities are modest, and the copy has to be right the first time, because a window with a typo in it is read by everybody who walks past.

## Reading it from the pavement

Die cut means the cut follows the outline of the artwork rather than a rectangle around it. On a window that matters more than anywhere else, because the glass behind the sticker is the background. A circle, a hexagon, a shape tracing the letters of a shop name: each sits on the glass as itself, with no border giving away that a sticker is there at all.

The practical decisions are about hierarchy. The name wants to be legible to somebody across the street. The opening times want to be legible to somebody who has stopped walking and is standing at the door. Card marks, licence numbers and membership emblems are smaller again, grouped low on the glass or on the door frame where the people looking for them will find them. Most storefront sets we cut end up as one large piece and a handful of small ones rather than a single crowded panel.

Measure the clear area of the glass, not the frame. The same decal reads very differently on a narrow pane and on a wide one, and the frame is the part people forget to subtract.

## An address without a ZIP of its own

Here is the wrinkle worth knowing before you check out. North Merrick has no ZIP code of its own in our records, which is common enough for places whose mail is sorted through a neighbouring post office. Nothing about that complicates an order. It means the order is keyed to the street address rather than the postcode: house number, street, place name and state, entered as your mail carrier reads them.

The reason to raise it is that people stall at the checkout, assume a lookup has broken, and abandon the form. Type the address the way it appears on a utility bill and carry on. If the decals are going to the shop rather than a home address, put the trading name on the line above the street, which is what the person at the door looks for.

## What a set of window decals comes to

Die-cut stickers are priced by the square inch, and the rate per square inch falls as the quantity rises:

35 cents at 1 to 24 pieces

30 cents at 25 to 49 pieces 28 cents at 50 to 99 pieces 26 cents at 100 to 249 pieces 24 cents at 250 to 499 pieces 22 cents at 500 pieces

A worked example is easier to follow than the table. A 2 by 2 inch sticker is 4 square inches. At 200 pieces the rate is 26 cents per square inch, so each one is $1.04 and 200 of them is $208.00. Order 250 and the rate drops to 24 cents, which puts the same 2 by 2 inch sticker at $0.96 each and the 250 at $240.00.

Fifty more pieces moves the total from $208.00 to $240.00 and lowers the price of every piece in the run, not only the extra fifty. If you sit near the top of a band, ask what the next one down does, because the larger quantity is often barely dearer and leaves you spares in a drawer.

## Ten pieces or ten dollars

There is an order minimum, and it is not a price floor. An order qualifies at 10 or more pieces, or at $10 of merchandise, whichever it reaches first. A storefront set of one large door decal and a few small notices usually clears the line on value long before it clears it on count, which is the point of two ways to qualify.

## Sixteen miles south west

North Merrick lies 16.0 miles south west of the shop in a straight line. We cut for several places close to it: North Bellmore at 1.3 miles, Roosevelt at 1.4, Freeport at 2.3, Merrick at 2.4, and East Meadow at the same 2.4. If you run more than one counter inside that cluster, treat them as one order rather than several.

Local pickup at the Huntington storefront is free. Otherwise the decals ship to you anywhere in the United States.

## Four people who order this way

The owner of a single storefront who has never bought decals before. Send the photograph and the measurements, and say what the window has to tell somebody who has not been in before.

The owner of two counters a short distance apart. Two sets of the same artwork at two sizes is one order, one setup and one quantity band, which usually beats two separate jobs.

The shop that revises its notices more than once a year. New opening times, a new payment mark, a licence renewal. These are the orders where buying into the next quantity band makes obvious sense, because the spare pieces have somewhere to go.

The person fitting out a unit that has not opened. You are working from a floor plan rather than glass you can measure. Send what you have, flag anything uncertain, and the proof can be checked against the real pane before the run is cut.

## Questions we are asked

Why does my North Merrick address not bring up a ZIP code at checkout?

Because we hold no ZIP for it. The order is keyed to the street address instead: house number, street, place name and state, as your mail carrier reads them.

Can I collect a North Merrick order at the Huntington shop instead of having it sent?

Yes. Local pickup is free, and since everything is printed and cut at the one address, collection is from the same counter where the job was made.

I want 200 two inch square decals for my North Merrick window. Is there any reason to order 250?

There is. 200 sit in the 26 cent band at $1.04 each, or $208.00. 250 fall into the 24 cent band at $0.96 each, or $240.00, and the lower rate applies to the whole run.

Can one order cover my North Merrick window and a second door in North Bellmore?

Yes. Put both sets of artwork on the same order and the combined quantity sets the rate per square inch. List the two shops separately in the notes so the pieces are grouped rather than mixed.

The sign writer who did my North Merrick storefront used a font I cannot identify. Can you match it?

Usually, from a clear straight on photograph of the lettering. If the face cannot be pinned down exactly, we redraw the letterforms so the new pieces sit alongside the old sign without looking like a different shop.