Vendor Spotlight: Name Above Names 2018
If you’ve been to the Fanboys Marketplace off Camp Bowie, you may have noticed this little darkened booth emitting an eery glow…several eery glows in fact. It’s the booth of Barry and Sarah Kilbane, Name Above Names 2018. They make these cool backlit LED signs in all sorts of colors using all of your favorite fandoms: Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Disney, and more. They even make personalized signs with your name, or even custom made designs if you need something that’s one-of-a-kind. I talked to Barry on the phone recently about his booth at Fanboys Marketplace and about his business.
Name Above Names 2018 is the father-daughter partnership of Barry and Sarah Kilbane. In late 2018, while on vacation, Barry’s son-a big Overwatch fan-suggested that he make an Overwatch sign. Which he did. People began to talk, so he made some more, and they started to sell. Riding on the success of that first initial run they made a few more Overwatch themed signs using different silhouettes. This lead to making signs for other game properties, which were equally as popular. Barry, who has been in the craft business for years, had an Etsy account that he had let fall to the wayside. The decision was made to start selling the signs on Etsy. Within their first two years of re-opening that site they were in Etsy’s top 98th percentile of sellers.
Which was great, except that they couldn’t keep up. They were getting so many orders per day that there was no way, with just the two of them, that they could fulfill all of the orders and do it in a timely manner. So, they decided to take down the Etsy shop and focus on a more localized market. After some hits and misses they discovered First Monday Trade Days in Canton, TX. “The World’s Largest Flea Market” as stated on their website. First Monday is a monthly flea market/trade show held in Canton, TX. It’s one of the only other places you can find Name Above Names 2018 other than at Fanboys Marketplace. That won’t always be the case! Name Above Names 2018 will soon be featured in Fanboys’ Denton location AND in the North East Mall location in Hurst once that store opens its doors.
Q&A:
Fanboys Marketplace: Your success sounds awesome, and this is your full time job, right?
Barry: Yeah, I quit my full time job about four years ago and have been focusing on this. It keeps us busy, y’now it’s just me and my daughter and on a good day we can crank out four signs. Sometimes life intervenes and things come up and we’ll loose a day here or there, but we average about 3 signs a day. We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin.
FM: If a customer has a custom design or idea, how much lead time to they need to give you…?
B: It depends on the complexity of it. For the name signs…those, usually about one to two weeks. As far as the other signs go-it all depends on the complexity of it. Some signs, we already know how to do it, it’s just a basic tweaking of our normal design and we can have it done in a couple of weeks. Some other signs though, could take two months.
FB: Once you own a sign is there any maintenance to it?
B: The lights are rated for 50,000 hours which works out to about five plus years of non-stop. So when I have people ask about that I tell ’em you’ll be having to get a new fridge or TV before you have to worry about this sign.
You can find Name Above Names 2018 at our Camp Bowie location currently. Look for them soon to appear at our Denton store and our new location in North East Mall opening on March 1st! You can see more of their work and get more information my visiting them on social media: Instagram is @nameabovenames2018, and you can check out their website https://nameabovenames2018.myshopify.com.