Success Story Caldera PrimeCenter and FAST SIGNS of Blaine

How FASTSIGNS of Blaine prints even faster with PrimeCenter 

January 29, 2025

You could say that sign making is in Chris Grandell’s blood. His father and grandfather started out printing traffic control signs back in the 70s. By the time Chris was six years old, he was happily running Gerber Signmaker IV-B plotters. Now he runs the whole business, a busy FASTSIGNS shop in Blaine, Minnesota, and as he’s using PrimeCenter, Caldera’s nesting program for large format printing and cutting. We caught up with him to ask how it’s going. 

The Deadline Slayers 

The Grandell family business became part of the FASTSIGNS family in 1998. Chris worked for his father part-time through high school and full-time during college. He knew he wanted to take it over and, in November 2021, he bought his parents out of the franchise. “I’m very familiar with the print world and I kind of enjoy watching how the industry has changed over the years,” he says. 

Now he’s running a well-established sign shop that supplies customers with yard signs, stickers, vehicle graphics, banners, floor graphics, interior, exterior signage and lots more.

“You name it, and we probably do it,” Chris explains. “For the stuff we can’t do inhouse, we know some great local and national vendors that we can work with. If a project’s too large for us to fabricate or if it involves complex electricals.” 

But do they have a specialty? Chris lights up. “You know, we pride ourselves on exceptional customer service. We try to make it as easy for our customers as we can, and we excel at meeting deadlines. Even if it’s a really tight deadline and we’ve just got a matter of hours to get the job done. We’re very good at finding out what a customer’s hard deadline is and making sure that we meet it.” 

I was sold during the free trial. PrimeCenter works with our RIP, all our printers and our cutter. The way Caldera has set up PrimeCenter is pretty genius !” 

The PrimeCenter epiphany 

To get some idea of how busy this sign shop is, it’s worth considering their kit. Chris reels it off: “We have a Mimaki JV33 that’s still running, we’ve got an Epson SureColor SC-S80600, we have an HP FB750 hybrid flatbed printer and we’ve just brought on a Canon Arizona 2360 GTF flatbed printer. We also have a Colex flatbed finishing table and cutter, which led us into looking at PrimeCenter.” 

Chris had to admit that they’re not using CalderaRIP to drive all the printers. “But PrimeCenter nests shapes so much better than our current RIP. It has an amazing ability to nest jobs together and optimize material usage, leading to great savings in both time and material. It also allows us to put marks in better places. We can do things like 18” x 24” corrugated plastic yard signs, and we can fill up the whole sheet and have marks just at the two ends with PrimeCenter. When we did this with our RIP, we’d have to make the marks manually, so using PrimeCenter is saving us probably 10 or 15 minutes per job. Savings like that really add up.” 

PrimeCenter nests shapes so much better than our current RIP. The financial savings in material alone were a couple of hundred dollars – and that’s just on one job.

Here’s an example. They were asked to produce some half-inch acrylic lettering for use in a lobby. “Laid out by hand, we probably would have used almost the entire 4×8 sheet, but using PrimeCenter to nest them, we were able to get that down to about a 16×48 inch piece. It just nested the shapes together better and took no time. In a matter of seconds, the recipe we had set up for PrimeCenter gave us the cut file. The financial savings in the material alone were a couple of hundred dollars – and that’s just on one job.” 

Discovering what PrimeCenter could do for him was something of an epiphany for Chris. “I looked at PrimeCenter on a webinar by Joey Phillips, Caldera’s Workflow Specialist. I was amazed by what it could do, and how fast and versatile it is. From a nesting point of view, it made our current RIP look elementary.”

Now, Chris can tie jobs together in ways that he never imagined, and it makes double-sided printing easy, with both sides lined up perfectly. “With the old RIP, doing double-sided signs was complicated and time consuming, but with PrimeCenter, we can set up whole sheets of different designs and specify the direction in which we want to flip the sheet over, all while combining three or four different jobs. It eliminates errors and makes the process so much easier.” 

A shared mission 

One thing Caldera and FASTSIGNS have in common is an emphasis on customer service. “When we got PrimeCenter, the Caldera team was amazingly responsive and always got back to me really quickly to help me solve any queries I had, and to help me work out how different features worked” says Chris. 

Another thing that really impressed Chris was the free PrimeCenter trial. “I was able to use the software for real, and when a vendor will put their money where their mouth is that tells me they believe in what they’re doing. In the space of that trial, I was sold. It works with all our printers and our cutter. It also works with our RIP, the way Caldera has set up PrimeCenter is pretty genius.” 

And obviously, we’re not going to argue with that! 

Discover PrimeCenter

PrimeCenter is a nesting software that simplifies file preparation for large format printing and cutting. Located upstream of your workflow, PrimeCenter checks, corrects, sorts, groups and prepares files for production.