Everybody in this trade will tell you three years. Nobody's banner lasts three years here, and the reason is not the printing.
Ask five shops how long an outdoor banner lasts and four of them will say three years, because that is what the material supplier's sheet says. That figure is measured in a European climate. Here is what actually happens in Malé.
The first thing to go is black, at around ten months. It does not fade evenly, it goes slightly brown and slightly flat, and because it happens over months nobody notices until they put a new banner beside the old one. Reds follow at about fourteen months, then oranges. Blues and greens hold longest, which is why an old banner tends to look cold.
There are three reasons it happens faster here than on the sheet. Ultraviolet at this latitude is simply stronger, and there is no cloudy season to give a banner a rest. Salt in the air settles on the surface and holds moisture against the print, particularly on anything within a few hundred metres of the sea, which in this country is everything. And heat: the surface of a dark banner in direct sun reaches well above sixty degrees, which ages both the ink and the PVC.
What actually extends the life is not better ink. It is three things. Lamination, which adds a real year and costs about eighteen per cent more, and which we recommend for anything that will hang more than a year. Shade, even partial: a banner under an overhang lasts roughly twice as long as one in open sun, so where there is a choice of wall, take the shaded one. And washing, which nobody does. A banner rinsed with fresh water twice a year looks noticeably better at eighteen months than one left alone, because the salt film is doing quiet damage the whole time.
Two practical things while we are here. Wind slits, which are three horizontal cuts in the lower third, let a gust through instead of tearing the eyelets out of the hem. And tie with cable ties or bungee rather than rope pulled tight. A banner pulled drum tight has nowhere to go in a gust and it is the eyelets that give, usually taking a strip of hem with them.
So when you budget for signage, budget for a banner every eighteen months and a rigid sign every six or seven years. A shop that tells you their banner will still look new in three years is either quoting the supplier's sheet or has not looked at one of their own after two.
