In early October 2016, Sign Source Solution had a unique opportunity to play a big part in the transformation of a small wrestling league here in the city. We printed event signage, banners and a 6x6 media wall in advance of a live wrestling event by Hogtown Wrestling in Toronto.
Hogtown Wrestling is the name of the new organism that emerged from the collapse of Victory Commonwealth Wrestling which was a market leader for live wrestling events. The Canadian amateur and Triple A circuit leagues grew more popular all across North America after the commercial success of the movie, The Wrestler in 2008. Founded one year later in the summer of 2009, the VCW organization grew from six to eight to a dozen skilled performers in less than a year. These athletic ‘actors’ each square off against one another in bouts once a month in a long term quest for the Title; the championship is embodied in a thick golden-buckle leather wrestling belt. Hogtown Wrestling uses the same venues, the same announcers, performers and sponsors, and even uses the same wrestling belt as their trophy, but they needed new banners and newly branded backgrounds for their Rogers TV show.
The print job was rushed from the start. It all happened extraordinarily quickly and I’m sure we ‘saved some bacon’ at the Hogtown club by turning it around on time. From their initial phone-call we learned the new organization’s first show was scheduled for Saturday Oct 1st 2016, and we got that call on Weds Sept 29th at about four thirty pm.
Jason Nadler, the founder of the new Hogtown Wrestling League sent us some simple designs which we thought were a little outdated, but he was in no mood for changes. He didn’t have the time or bandwidth to consider any fresh designs, so we rushed the job through the system and were done everything by Friday at noon.
Vanessa, a designer here at Sign Source Solution and this particular account manager reports, “In this case the client provided the artwork so we received the files and once I’d checked the resolution and size were correct, I set the files ready to print.” She continues, “The files were high resolution jpg’s (300 dpi) which means they were big enough for large scale printing. Our printer is HP Designjet L26500. The material we selected is standard gloss banner 13 oz, 38” roll for the smaller banners, and we changed it to 60” roll for the large ‘media wall’ banner. It took around two hours for printing in total and around another hour trimming and setting up the banners in the hardware (rollup banners) and putting the grommets in the media wall.”
Having the new banners and the media wall printed and on display at the initial wrestling event added more confidence to the administrators and announcers who started the show by announcing the name change and the birth of the new Hogtown Wrestling League. The performers must have also felt immense pride knowing they’re part of something tangible and ‘visible’. And of course the audience was branded, from start to finish, by watching performers walk in front of the banners as the entered and exited the ring.
These banners are collectible. When the Hogtown Wrestling League evolves more sophisticated banner designs, which we would happily provide, we’ll take these iconic first drafts back and keep them in our museum for posterity – the first ever Hogtown Wrestling banners are sure to be collectible!
