Sweet Sign Solutions - Our Story

If you were a business in 1920, you didn’t need a marketing department. You needed a sign. George Sweet Sr. understood this before most people could spell “brand.” A sign wasn’t just a slab of wood or a splash of neon paint, it was your business’s first handshake with the world.

And unlike advertising copy, which disappears into the ether, a sign is gloriously, obstinately permanent. It says: We exist. We’ll be here tomorrow. And we’re worth noticing. That was George’s insight: signs weren’t decoration, they were reputation, cast in steel and lit up in neon.

By the 1960s, Sweet Signs had become such a fixture that the workshop bore a line that was equal parts slogan and provocation: “We made signs before we could talk.”

This wasn’t corporate fluff. It was literally true. Long before advertising jingles or TV spots, the sign was commerce’s first language. Signs gave identity to shops, reassurance to customers, and visibility to brands. A sign doesn’t just communicate; it pre-commits your business to being real.

George Sweet Jr. inherited not just a business but a philosophy. To him, a sign was advertising in its purest form tangible, unavoidable, visible even to people who weren’t looking. He pulled in his son Tom (sales), John (operations), and a bright-eyed protégé named Richard Dawson, who learned everything from fabrication to installation. Together, they stopped being “a sign shop” and started being something more dangerous: an ideas business disguised as a sign company.

When George Jr. stepped aside, Richard Dawson took the wheel. He didn’t merely preserve the business, he reframed it. Sweet Sign became the signage partner for banks, universities, hospitals, and supermarkets that needed not just signs, but consistency at scale. Because here’s the truth: a sign isn’t just a marker of where you are. It’s a promise of what you are.

In 2012, Christine Dawson joined him. Where Richard scaled the vision, Christine solved the puzzles. She took on the things that most businesses trip over: administration, HR, accounting, and the endless spaghetti of operations. Then she went further, diving into interior vinyl manufacturing. Her passion for solving problems wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was the invisible architecture that allowed everything else to flow. Efficiency improved. Service improved. Clients didn’t just get signs faster, they got certainty.

If Richard was the strategist, Christine was the systems designer. She made the messy bits work. And in business, as in life, it’s the messy bits that usually break.

A hundred years on, Sweet Sign is still here, bigger, sharper, and more visible than ever. From hand-painted boards to digital displays, from neon to LED, the medium has changed but the message hasn’t:

A sign is never just a sign. It’s your business, made visible.

And perhaps the most astonishing thing is this: in an era where marketing departments spend fortunes chasing attention, a sign quietly does the job every second of every day. It’s the most efficient media spend you’ll ever make.

Our values haven’t changed because they don’t need to: integrity, craftsmanship, accountability, and partnership. That’s why more than a thousand corporate clients across the tri-state region from Chase to ShopRite to Merck trust us to make their brands visible, consistent, and unmistakable.

In short: signs speak first. And if you want your business to speak clearly, confidently, and continuously, Sweet Sign has been making that possible for over a century.