143yearold firm hit by toughest challenge
Company’s signs adorn many Bay Area businesses, institutions
Clouds made of steel. Letters wrought in neon. A giant map pin towering from the rooftops as if dropped from the heavens.
The soaring metal structures that adorn the offices and grounds of Salesforce, Mozilla, SFMOMA, the Exploratorium and the Asian Art Museum are just a few enduring additions the Thomas Swan Sign Co. has made to the face of San Francisco and the Bay Area.
The giant letters that crown the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall were also fashioned by the company, along with its donor plaque and even the numbers on the auditorium seats.
The letters that ornament the Boudin Bakery at Fisherman’s Wharf are also Swan’s handiwork, along with a handpainted mural.
For more than a century, the company has designed, built and installed some of the most recognizable monolithic signs and structures inside and out of buildings across the Bay Area.
San Francisco was already 101 years old when the business opened as a sign painting shop on Howard Street. The first cable cars were already climbing the city’s hills. But in the
decades that followed, the firm left an indelible mark on the city.
The company has survived earthquakes, fires, and even a pandemic — the 1918 Spanish influenza.
Thomas Swan has grown and changed along with the region, but the coronavirus has been a challenge like no other.
With the virus showing no signs of abating and cases on the rise in the Bay Area, the endurance of longtime companies like Thomas Swan could be a bellwether for what the region looks like after the pandemic.
“We’re known as the expensive sign company,” said Mike Roberts, who owns the business along with his wife and her family. “There’s nobody our size around here.”
As larger projects dry up and companies cut costs and fold, that prestige could weigh on Swan. Business is down 40% to 50% from where it was last year, when the company completed around 1,700 signs or other projects. Those jobs can cost from $200 to $500,000, with some contracts worth up to $1 million.
As tech companies ponder whether they want to stay in San Francisco and remote work, allowing them to escape its high office rents and housing costs, a whole category of customers who wished to loudly announce their physical presence in San Francisco could well evaporate.
The business has changed with the times before, Roberts said.
More than a decade ago, the company moved across the bay to a more spacious production facility in Richmond. South of Market had gone from a warehouse district where Thomas Swan constructed its signs to the world’s app factory — which was good for business, as customers like Salesforce grew and grew, but bad for the work.
“I don’t know how we did production out of there for as long as we did,” Roberts said of the company’s old Howard Street facilities. The neighborhood was less crowded and more industrial when his wife’s grandfather bought the business in the early 1950s.
As highways rose up over SoMa and commuting boomed, so did the danger of moving huge pieces of glass and metal across multiple lanes of whizzing cars.
“It was very dangerous to work because of the traffic,” Roberts said, recalling some close calls on the stretch of road between Seventh and Eighth streets.
The company’s Bay Area presence extends well beyond San Francisco.
Roberts said the company made WilliamsSonoma’s first sign when the business started roughly six decades ago and it still works on projects for Corte Madera’s Restoration Hardware.
In Oakland, the company inlaid the steel letters in the concrete throughout the Cathedral of Christ the Light.
But now, customer orders are down across sectors, reflecting the toll the virus has taken on retail and office work in particular.
Companies, particularly in tech, that dot the city and the region have hired Roberts’ firm in the past to deck out offices with cut and casted logos. With offices shut and most of their former occupants working from home, those jobs have been put on hold, or canceled.
“It’s taking away from our workload,” Roberts said.
The company has tried producing the barriers that businesses are now adopting to assure a virussafe distance between customers or workers.
But that only goes so far.
“Other companies, that’s all they do,” Roberts said, adding it is hard to compete on price.
The company’s specialty is work that straddles a line between the industrial and the artistic.
Last year, Swan fabricated and installed a gigantic map pin atop SFMOMA, mimicking a point on a smartphone map in epic proportions.
Called simply Map, the installation by artist Aram Bartholl was part of an exhibition called Snap & Share on the history of the transmission of photography.
This year, a planned lighting display worth $40,000 for SFMOMA had to be canceled because of the pandemic, Roberts said, which had forced the museum to close and cut staff.
Roberts, too, has had to scale back his business.
Two of his staff moved out of state after the business temporarily shut its doors in March during the shelterinplace period.
He laid off three other employees to cut overhead, although he said they were on their way out already.
“I don’t like doing that,” Roberts said.
The company doesn’t disclose its revenue or profit. Around 43 people work there, many of whom have been with Thomas Swan for more than a decade.
Earlier in the pandemic, the company received a forgivable loan through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which helped businesses keep staff on through the crisis.
The coronavirus has affected Swan’s business in other ways.
The San Francisco Planning Department is the firm’s main point of contact with the city when starting a new job.
Permits specifying how high a sign can be placed on a building, ensuring lighting doesn’t bother people living nearby, and arranging for any street closures during installation all come through the department.
Roberts described a delicate dance with city planners before the pandemic. Gentle inperson prodding was sometimes essential to get a project approved on time.
“Everyone is working from home now,” Roberts said, adding he only interacts over the phone with half the planners he used to.
Planning Department spokeswoman Gina Simi did not address specific questions about staffing and delays. The department’s website says staffers working from home are available by email.
Before the pandemic, the permitting process took about a month, according to Roberts’ son, Andrew Roberts, who also works at Swan.
The department’s appointments system now has backlogs of four to six months, Andrew Roberts said.
“A lot of our clients are not too happy,” he added.
Many companies have deadlines of their own to meet and are taken aback when told they are likely to miss them by weeks or months.
Mike Roberts said the cost of applying for permits is a relatively small part of project budgets. Slowdowns at the initial planning stage means fewer jobs get done, and that revenue is slower to come in. Some projects are paid partly upfront and in full only on completion.
So work has slowed, although accounts with the likes of Salesforce and Twitter are still intact. But with business down significantly, the Roberts family is concerned about projects it has lost.
“None of those jobs have come back yet,” the elder Roberts said. “Some won’t.”