Wheatpasting San Francisco

What neighbourhoods do you cover in San Francisco?

We work across the Mission District, Haight Ashbury, SoMa, the Tenderloin, Castro, Hayes Valley, Dogpatch and Downtown along Market Street. These are the corridors with the strongest foot traffic and the most active street culture in the city. We hand pick every location based on your target audience. Music and creative campaigns land hardest in the Mission and Haight Ashbury where San Francisco street culture has been most deeply rooted for decades. Fashion and lifestyle brands do well in Hayes Valley and Dogpatch where the creative professional audience is most concentrated. SoMa gives you access to the tech and startup community alongside a dense nightlife and arts crowd. The Tenderloin and Downtown along Market Street deliver the broadest demographic reach across the city. We know these streets well and we will put your posters where people actually stop and look.

What kinds of brands and campaigns work best with wheatpasting in San Francisco?

Music releases, film and TV campaigns, tech product launches, fashion drops, nightlife and event promotions, gallery openings and consumer brand activations all perform strongly on San Francisco streets. The city sits at the intersection of the global technology industry and one of the most historically rich counterculture and arts scenes in the United States. That combination produces an audience that is highly educated, culturally engaged and receptive to street level campaigns that feel intelligent and visually strong. Tech and gaming brands launching consumer products find San Francisco wheatpasting particularly effective for reaching early adopters. Music and arts campaigns benefit from the city's long tradition of street poster culture that stretches back through decades of concert promotion in the Bay Area. Brands that feel innovative and culturally credible consistently get the strongest results here.

How long does a wheatpasting campaign run in San Francisco?

Most campaigns stay up and looking good for 2 to 4 weeks. San Francisco has a mild and relatively dry climate for most of the year and wheatpaste bonds quickly and firmly to the concrete and brick surfaces most common across the Mission, SoMa and Hayes Valley. The city does experience fog and coastal moisture particularly in summer and we factor that into placement decisions, favouring sheltered and covered surfaces where possible to extend campaign life. If a poster gets covered or damaged during the campaign we will replace it. We photograph every installation so you can see exactly where your posters went up across the city.

San Francisco campaigns typically run between $2,000 and $8,000. Where you land in that range depends on how many posters you want, what size, how many neighbourhoods you want to hit, and whether you need us to design the artwork. A small run of 25 posters across one area sits at the lower end. A bigger push across multiple corridors using large format 48x72 inch posters sits toward the top. Everything is all-in with printing and street installation included in one price so there are no surprise costs on top. Fill out the form and we will come back to you with a quote within the hour.

Yes, everything is done in house. We print and we paste. Most wheatpasting companies outsource the printing and charge you separately for it. We have our own print operation so you deal with one team from start to finish, the turnaround is faster, and we can catch any quality issues before a single poster goes up on the street. You bring us the brief or the artwork and we handle the rest.

Our most popular size is 24x36 inches which works well across most San Francisco street locations and gives your artwork real impact at eye level. For high visibility walls in the Mission and SoMa where you want something that commands attention from a distance we go up to 48x72 inches. San Francisco has strong concrete and brick wall surfaces throughout the Mission and Haight Ashbury that lend themselves well to large scale multi-sheet takeovers. We print everything in house so we are not limited to set sizes and if your campaign calls for something specific we can work with you on it.

Yes. Our graphic designers work with you on the artwork if you need it. San Francisco street culture has its own distinct visual language shaped by decades of concert promotion, counterculture and tech industry influence and what works on a screen or in a studio does not always translate to a Mission District or Haight Ashbury wall at street level. We know what reads well from a distance, what holds up in coastal light and fog conditions, and what actually gets photographed and shared. If you already have print ready artwork great. If not we can build it from your brand assets.

Set your file up with a 1/8 inch bleed on all sides and keep any important text or logos at least 0.25 inches inside the trim line so nothing gets cut during finishing. Resolution should be between 150 and 300 DPI at full print size. 300 DPI gives you the sharpest result and 150 DPI is usually fine at large format viewing distances. Colour mode needs to be CMYK not RGB and PDF is the safest file format to send us. If you are not sure whether your file is set up correctly send it over and we will check it before anything goes to print.

For most campaigns we can go from artwork approval to posters on San Francisco streets within a few days. If you have a tight deadline around a product launch, a show, a release or a live event tell us upfront and we will work around it. Same day printing is available for urgent jobs. The fact that we print in house means we are not waiting on a third party to deliver stock before we can start installation.

We photograph every poster at the time of installation and send you a full set of campaign photos showing each placement in context on the street. You can see exactly where your campaign landed across San Francisco. Photos are delivered within 24 hours of installation completing.