LonoWood Art Co. Helps Orchard Park, NY Restaurant Get Social

The days of bars offering a beer list that consists solely of Budweiser, Miller, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Heineken have long passed. As yet another example of commerce and social trends invariably traveling full-circle: the beer-purveyor landscape now more closely resembles a 19th-century tap room (minus the smartphones and shorter hemlines): a plethora of local brands that flourished before the beer industry’s centralization. Today, the brewing titans in St. Louis and Milwaukee still command the largest marketshare, but they feel enough pressure from the microbreweries and their – editorializing – vastly superior products.
The O.P. Social Tap & Grille, which opened in Orchard Park, NY, a Buffalo suburb, offers the requisite beer list – microbrew stalwarts Goose Island, Great Lakes and popular imports such as Labatt’s and Stella Artois – and gourmet fare, such as shrimp risotto and braised duck. Such an upscale enterprise requires a bit more than garden-variety channel letters. As such, Hart Hotels, which operates various hospitality properties throughout upstate New York, hired LonoWood Art. Co. (Albion, NY) to fabricate a bracket-mounted sign for the establishment.
Co-owner Terri Wood designed the sign using SAI’s FlexiSign Pro software, and transferred the file into Delcam’s ArtCAM 3-D software to prepare for CNC-router production. Fabricator Shawn Mosier fine-tuned the Sign*Foam 18-lb. HDU sign following job shop PRWP’s shaping the sign on a Flexicam router, and finished the sign with Benjamin Moore exterior-latex paint and 23k goldleaf. Co-owner Mark Wood turned the beer glass on a lathe; LonoWood sculpted the foamy head of “suds” from Gorilla Glue. To build the sign’s steel-tube and bracket hardware, Wood enlisted Jentsch and Co. Not only functional, the frame reinforces the retro-cool aesthetic. She noted the steel elements echo the steel hardware used for the wall’s adjacent awning brackets.