Aaron Thomason, owner of Arc Studios Photography in Dalton, Ga., knows the value of a print. It’s what helps showcase and sell his artistic portrait photography.
With a variety of inkjet-printable media from which to choose through LexJet, Thomason is able to present his work in a variety of formats, each with its own unique look.
“I don’t have to do any advertising other than the promotional printing I do for my studio and storefront. I can place a banner stand next to the street so people driving by can see it, so I get a lot of people stopping in who saw it when they drove or walked by the studio,” says Thomason. “I typically use a big image with just a few simple words so that my studio is in the back of their mind when they need something I can provide.”
For banner stands, Thomason uses a LexJet Blizzard Outdoor Stand with LexJet TOUGHcoat Water-Resistant Polypropylene, and on his storefront windows he uses Photo Tex Repositionable Fabric. “I change those images up regularly and they work great. They see some rain and other weather, but the images have held up fine,” says Thomason.
On the inside of the studio, Thomason showcases canvas gallery wraps printed on either LexJet Sunset Reserve Bright Matte Canvas or LexJet Sunset Production Matte Canvas, and Photo Tex for wall murals.
He also uses LexJet Sunset Photo Metallic Paper for images that lend themselves to the pearlescent pop of the paper.
“Before I started doing my own printing I was lucky if I sold one canvas print per session. Now I’m able to sell three or four canvases per portrait client since I was able to bring the price down by doing it in-house,” explains Thomason. “We stretch the canvas here on a 1 1/2″ frame and add the UV coating, so I’m able to produce canvas less expensively for my customers, deliver it on time and ultimately sell more canvas.”
“We spent the first two years trying to find something that would adhere to the concrete walls. We tested a material during the summer before the initial opening of the stadium and that material seemed to work perfectly, but when we applied the vinyl a week before the game, in the winter months, the ambient temperature of the concrete had dropped considerably. The next day, we received a call from the Cotton Bowl folks telling us that a majority of our stickers had fallen off the walls. After all of our testing we were very surprised. We found a way to fix the signs that failed, but it made the project much more difficult and time-consuming,” says Jeff Teasley, owner of E.H. Teasley & Co. “In 2011 we were lucky to find PhotoTex. It’s a lighter weight material, and the adhesion properties are so much better than what we used for the prior game. To make sure we were on the right track before the game installation, we took it to a business near us with stucco-type walls. The graphic stayed up there for months in all of the outdoor elements. Seeing this, we felt confident that Photo Tex would do the job. Now we could sleep at night.”
The graphics were printed on the company’s superwide solvent printers, which included a quantity of 352 four foot by four foot die-cut helmets and logos cut on a Zund cutter. These graphics lined the various levels of the stadium, the tunnels where the teams enter the field, as well as the lobbies of the host hotels. The hotel elevators were also branded with Photo Tex 
