Montréal, Québec
Crowd control in Montreal
Stanchions, velvet ropes, barricades and printed signage to buy or to rent, delivered across the island, Laval and the south shore.
What Montreal orders
The equipment is standard. The wording is not.
Most of a Montreal order is the same catalogue everyone else buys from, and it ships the same way. The part that needs a decision before anything is made is the printed items, because those are produced to order and cannot be re-lettered afterwards. Send the French wording with the brief rather than the English and a translation to follow, and the whole order moves as one.
Belts printed in French
The wording is set from your copy, not translated by us. Repeat lengths are worked out so a phrase is not cut in half by the post.
Sign panels, both faces
A frame takes a printed sheet on each side. Where a room needs two languages, that is two sheets rather than two frames.
Barricade covers for the street
Printed scrim across a run of steel, which is the largest thing anyone reads at an outdoor event and the most expensive to reprint.
Where we deliver
The island, Laval and the south shore.
Deliveries cross the bridges in both directions and the timing is planned around that rather than around the distance, which on this island is rarely the thing that decides when a truck arrives. Old Montreal is its own case: several of the hotels and halls there have no dock at all and everything goes in through a street door.
- Montréal
- Laval
- Longueuil
- Brossard
- Saint-Laurent
- Westmount
- Verdun
- Dorval
- Terrebonne
- Repentigny
- Boucherville
Orders go where the city puts its events:
- the convention centre downtown
- the arena and the halls in the entertainment quarter
- the Olympic park and the grounds around it
- the hotels and old warehouses in Vieux-Montréal
- the museums along Sherbrooke
- the airport terminals in Dorval
Tell us whether the room has a dock or a doorway. In this city that single answer changes how an order is packed more often than the address does.
Getting the printing right
Printed items are made, not picked off a shelf.
A stock post ships from stock. A printed belt is manufactured for your order, which puts it on a different footing from everything beside it in the brief: the artwork has to be settled before anything is produced, and a change afterwards is a new run rather than an amendment. That is not a Quebec problem — it is true everywhere — but it is felt here because the wording carries a requirement rather than only a message.
Send the guideline, not a colour name
A brand file gives us the exact colour. A colour name gives us an approximation, and on a long run of belts the difference is visible end to end.
Decide the wording first
Everything printed is produced together. Settling the French copy at the start is what keeps the printed items on the same delivery as the posts.
Order the spares with the run
A replacement belt in a printed set has to come from the same run to match. One ordered later is a new production of one belt.
Worth asking
What a Montreal brief raises first.
- Do you produce the printed wording in French?
- Yes, and it is set from the copy you send rather than translated in-house — we produce printing, not translation, and a phrase that reads slightly wrong on a belt is on that belt for the life of it. Send the French text as it should appear and it is printed exactly that way.
- Can one frame carry two languages?
- A frame takes a printed sheet on each face, so a two-sided stand can carry a different sheet each way. Where both have to be read from the same direction, that is two frames rather than one, and it is worth deciding at the layout stage because it changes the count.
- How do you get onto a site in Vieux-Montréal?
- Usually through a door rather than a dock. Several of the halls and hotels down there were not built for a truck, so an order for that quarter is packed to be carried rather than wheeled, and we plan the drop around the street rather than the building.
- Can you match a rope colour to our brand?
- Within the range we carry, yes, and the honest answer is that velvet does not take a brand colour exactly — the pile changes what the eye reads. Where the colour has to be right rather than close, printing on a belt holds a brand colour far better than dyed rope does.
- We are running the same activation in another province. Does anything change?
- The equipment does not. The printed items usually do, because the wording is the part that is specific to where it is read. We keep the artwork so a second city gets the same layout with its own text rather than a redesign.
Ask for a quote
Send us the Montreal brief and the French wording with it.
Add what you need with the Buy or Rent button on each product, then open the order and say how many and where. You get a written quote back with the options laid out. Delivery, setup and collection are quoted on their own lines, so you can take them or leave them.