On Monday we featured Overall Murals as our company of the day. Overall murals hand-paints walls across the United States. Insider talked with co-founder Angel Saemai about wall painting.
How did you get into the out of home business.
On one of my first visits to New York in 2006, on a break from grad school, I saw a large hand painted H&M advertisement in SoHo and was struck by its size and method of creation. The next year, I had moved to NYC, and when I was a digital media planner at Universal McCann, I serendipitously met my future husband and business partner, Dmitry Pankov. He had been a graffiti and street artist and after his studies at the University of Art and Culture in Russia, found himself in Brooklyn to pursue art. One of his first jobs was designing and installing signage for a local sign shop. Later, he told me that one of the first things in the city that made an impact on him was seeing the large wall outside of Penn Station being painted for Delta Airlines. As he watched the painters work on it, he thought, “That’s what I want to do with my life.” After we married and opened a small successful design, sign and mural painting shop, the deep down desire to do something bigger in the public realm grew stronger. With little out-of-home industry connections or experience, but a whole lot of passion, we opened Overall Murals in 2010. Today, with growing national inventory, a team of talented painters and a savvy business team, through many ups and downs – including the pandemic, we are intent to continue the adventure we embarked on ten years ago.
How has covid impacted your company.
As with the rest of the industry, our business took a major dive in Q2 as brands went into capital preservation mode and advertising budgets got locked up. As mobility and traffic increases there is a tremendous immediate opportunity for advertisers to invest in OOH. We were very fortunate to see business significantly rebound for certain categories in Q3 – keeping us super busy into Q4. Alcohol, automotive and home entertainment continue to value hand painted advertising as a go to format to connect with consumers. The marketplace has certainly not fully recovered, but these times have forced us to be better. We’ve had to become more flexible and strategic in terms of internal communications, creativity, resourcefulness and teamwork. Hand painted ads are labor intensive, and while our in office employees were able to work from home, producing murals is impossible without in person work. We watched carefully and cautiously as the stay at home orders were implemented and found ways to deliver on our promises to clients while keeping our artists safe and socially distant. During this historical time, we painted a couple of notable campaigns. One was for NYC’s Department of Health and Mental Health’s Thank you to Essential COVID-19 Workers. And another, we created our own internal initiative called Do The Right Thing in Brooklyn outlining the chaotic events during the first half of 2020, and gave proceeds from merchandise sales to a local non-profit. Although this year has been tough for virtually everyone, it has also provided an even larger sense of company morale and reinforced the pride we have for what we do.
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