I did a total 180 degrees on the banner side of my new business. As I originally set out to run actual bars I thought “My own banner on the side, that’ll do!” How wrong was I! About 3 months in I had a company approach me that wanted their own banners on the side of our bus. It would be pointless to stick one on the side of the bus and then have to peal it off. You end up taking half the paint with you. I actually had to take a step backwards. Someone bought the frame that sat on the side of the bus. I made a big point of putting all the bits up for sale in a public arena to help the Routemaster fraternity keep all it’s original bits. Wish I hadn’t though!!!

Of course I totally forgot that at this stage I had actually bought a second bus! It has it’s frame on it and was literally sitting there all this time. The removal was easy enough but they did need a good old tidy up. My number two has been outside for a few years and she’s gotten rather green. That’s soon all going to change though but that is for another blog post in the future!

So, the first set of banners I did where a pain in the a****! I soon realized this is something that is rather popular and is also something I can charge extra for. It’s all well and good scoring a major advertising tour with a big corporate company but you do have to earn money and if there are little extra jobs you can include then you do! Banners is one of them.  Labor intensive but totally worth it!

It had taken a mammoth amount of measuring, testing and simply practice to get these boards looking right! Have you Have you ever tried to stick down a 7 meter sticker wihthout and creases or bubbles? I didn’t think so!! The first set took nearly 7 hours. The last lot took 2. They also look a hell of a lot better so im glad to say there is progress! Here are some examples of my banner handy work.

The Carlsberg banner is one that I’ll never forget. It was one of the very first I produced and I had fitted it to stay in place along the way. As I turned onto the M23 (20 minutes into my first journey for them) a lorry flew pasted and the driver-side banner came clean off! I pulled over think I was going to rescue it until I realized that with today’s volume of traffic it was never going to happen. Further more as I looked on another lorry drove over the boards spread all over the M23 and covered me in shards of foamex!! Great start to the trip……

The hard shoulder on any motorway is dangerous place to be at any given time of the day. Realizing this and giving up on a banner rescue attempt, I reached for the ladder inside, packed up the remaining banner safely and abandoned the crash site!

I never litter but in this instance I thought it better to get cleaned up by the pro’s. They did! I drove past two more times that week but they left the sections on the side of the road. So Carlsberg got a months worth of free M23 advertising! I should’ve charged them!