A Century of Trust: How Landells Signs Helped Build the Face of Coles — Store by Store
Some business relationships last a few projects. A rare few last generations.
Landells Signs’ relationship with Coles is in that rare category: a century-plus partnership built on reliability, manufacturing discipline, and an obsession with doing the job better, faster, and with less risk, at scale.
Landells’ own history states they signed Coles’ earliest store and have continued to deliver Coles signage ever since, making this one of the longest-running branding and signage relationships in Australia.
And when you look at how many signage businesses have shrunk, disappeared, or been forced into compromised offshore models, that longevity says something powerful: this is best-practice operations made visible.
Where it began: the first Coles Store, and the first Coles Signs
Coles began in 1914, with the first store opened in Smith Street, Collingwood (Melbourne).
Landells’ published company history credits the business with producing Coles’ earliest signage and continuing that work across the network over the decades. (Note: Landells’ own pages reference different start years in different places, 1914 in one, 1918 in another, but both point to a 100+ year partnership.)
The meaning is the same: Coles grew from a single storefront into a national institution, and Landells remained the trusted signage partner through each era of retail change.
“Every store since then” isn’t a slogan, it’s a systems achievement
If you’ve ever been involved in multi-site rollouts, you know what this really means:
Consistency across thousands of touchpoints
Precision manufacturing at pace
Repeatable installation quality
Safe methods, compliance, and minimal disruption to trade
Rapid turnaround for refurbishments, rebrands, and new formats
Landells highlights national rollout capability across the Coles Group footprint and describes the work as design, manufacture, and installation of multiple signage types across hundreds of locations and formats.
This isn’t “one great sign.” It’s industrial-grade repeatability, with brand integrity intact.
What “Coles Signage” actually includes
A Coles site isn’t one sign. It’s a complete signage ecosystem, typically including:
External brand & site identification
Building fascia signs and primary brand marks (often illuminated)
Entry statements and canopy signage
Pylon signs and precinct directory pylons (where relevant)
Landells specifically positions capability in 3D and illuminated signage, and large-scale external solutions like pylons, critical to supermarket visibility and trade area capture.
Internal customer navigation and retail communication
Aisle markers and category identifiers
Department zones (fresh, bakery, deli, checkouts)
Promotional and campaign signage systems
Landells’ Coles project description references internal signage and other in-store sign systems delivered at scale.
Safety, compliance and operational signage
Back-of-house safety signage (PPE, hazards, plant rooms)
Fire and egress signage (as required)
Loading dock and traffic management signage
Regulatory notices and operational labelling
Landells emphasises safety standards and professional installation processes as part of their capability model, especially important in live retail environments.
Rollouts, refreshes, and new formats
Modern retail constantly evolves: new store concepts, “local” formats, refurbishments, brand updates, tenancy changes, and acquisition integrations. The signage partner must be able to re-tool quickly, standardise, and deliver with tight timeframes. Landells’ Coles work is presented as a national refresh / rollout across multiple store brands.
Why Landells thrives while others shrink: smart investment in time, cost, and risk
The reason long-term clients stay isn’t sentiment, it’s outcomes.
Landells positions itself as a manufacturing-led signage business with repeatable, tried-and-true processes, built from long experience and refined into systems that reduce cost and risk.
That matters because in signage, especially at national scale, risk is expensive:
Delays impact store openings and refurbishment timelines
Defects multiply across sites
Rework creates safety and compliance exposure
Inconsistent branding erodes trust and customer experience
So when Landells invests in:
process design,
quality control,
installation methodology,
and manufacturing capability,
…they’re not “spending more”. They’re engineering out failure, and passing value back to the client through speed, consistency, and fewer issues.
That is how you become “unbeatable value” without ever becoming “cheap”.
A manufacturing powerhouse in a country where manufacturing is in decline
Australia has watched too many manufacturing capabilities disappear or be hollowed out. That’s why Landells’ model matters.
A century-plus Coles partnership demonstrates that advanced local manufacturing still wins when it is paired with:
disciplined operations,
modern production thinking,
strong safety culture,
and an ability to deliver at national scale.
Landells calls itself the oldest trading signage company in Australia, and frames its longevity as the result of staying ahead through economic cycles and industry disruption.
The takeaway: Coles didn’t just choose a supplier, they chose a system they can trust
Anyone can manufacture a sign.
But when a brand like Coles needs signage delivered across thousands of sites, year after year, through changing formats and tightening standards, what they’re really buying is:
certainty
reliability
scalability
and operational excellence
That’s what a 100+ year relationship represents.
Landells Signs isn’t just producing signs for Coles.
They’re helping produce the Coles experience, store by store, generation by generation.