Digital signage
in Wellington

What actually gets lost, in order of how hard it is to recover:

• The passing trade. Gone entirely and instantly. Nothing replaces it while the door is boarded.
• The routine customer. Someone who came weekly finds an alternative in a fortnight and keeps it. This is the expensive one.
• And the address itself. After a year away, a proportion of people simply do not know you reopened.

The window of the closed premises is the one asset that keeps working, and it is almost always wasted: a hoarding with a date and an address does more than any reopening campaign later. Where you are trading meanwhile, when you come back, how to order in the meantime. It costs nothing and it is read by exactly the people you are about to lose.

There is a second piece that matters more than it sounds and that has to be set up before the doors close: a way to keep talking to regulars that does not depend on the address. A list, a group, anything. A business with no channel other than its frontage goes silent the day the frontage disappears, and silence for a year is what turns a temporary closure into a permanent one.

If works are on the horizon, put the reopening date and the temporary address on the window before the last day, not after. The people who read it are the ones who would otherwise not come back.

Three things follow from that, and all three are about timing rather than message:

• Monday morning is the strongest habit of the week. People arrive on a fixed routine, at a fixed time, past the same doors. Whatever is on the window then is seen by more of your regulars than at any other moment.
• Friday after three is a different city. The office crowd thins out early, and anything planned for a Friday evening peak is planned for a peak that does not arrive.
• The weekend customer does not know you. They live nearby, they are not in a hurry, and they have never read the window because they have never walked past it on a Tuesday.

The practical split is between the weekday content and the weekend one, and it is bigger than it sounds: during the week you are talking to people who know exactly what you sell, at the weekend to people who do not. The same window, two audiences that never meet, and the basics are only worth showing to one of them.

There is a further effect worth planning for, because it hits every year at the same time: the long summer break empties the offices for weeks. In a city like this the quiet is not a bad month, it is the annual pattern — and the businesses that do well in it are the ones that spent the year giving the weekend crowd a reason to remember them.

Count your takings by day of the week for a month. If Monday to Thursday looks like one business and Saturday like another, your window should not be saying the same thing on both.