About us
Three generations, one family, since 1940
From hand-painted signs and pinstripes to full digital wraps — same family, same standards.
Lombardo Lettering is a family-owned business in Chester, NJ, lettering vehicles since 1940 — three generations of expertise. Our aim is to help businesses connect with customers while enhancing lead generation through impressive displays. Our mobile service means we bring our expertise right to your location, saving you precious time. Today that includes mobile truck lettering done at the customer’s yard.
At our core, we help blue-collar and service-based businesses turn their vehicles and signage into 24/7 rolling advertisements that actually look professional and build trust. That is a different job from printing something cheap and fast, and it is why customers whose fathers used us still call when a new truck arrives.
The Lombardo legacy
1940–1960
Frank Lombardo Sr.
Established in 1940 by Frank Lombardo Senior, the business began with old-fashioned talent: painted signage, pinstripes and murals. After serving his country in the army, he utilized his talents to build a career for himself and lay the foundation for a family legacy.
1970–Present
Frank Lombardo Jr.
As time progressed, the business was handed down to Frank Lombardo Jr. After learning all of his father’s tips, tricks, and work ethic, Frank moved away from the paint and brushes and modernized the business to where it is today. With the inclusion of the latest technologies including vinyl decals, wraps and varieties of adhesive graphics he has honed his craft.
Present day
Tristan Lombardo
Now, as the third generation, Tristan Lombardo strives to grow the business while maintaining the original values and integrity it was founded on. Having worked alongside his father since early childhood, he is the first generation to graduate from college, earning an associate’s degree in business and a certification in small business management.
Why mobile
Our competitors require you to drop your vehicle off, and it can take days before your asset is returned. For a contractor, that is not an inconvenience, it is lost revenue. We work on site to complete the job and get you back up and running in no time. For generations that decision has taken us into yards, driveways, municipal garages, quarries and farm sheds across eight counties.
What we will not do
We do not use cheap calendared vinyl that looks fine for a season and then lifts at the edges. We do not cut a job before you have approved a proof on your own vehicle. And we do not talk a customer into a full wrap when lettering would get the same result for a fraction of the money. We use the highest quality materials and decals, resulting in brilliant design color and glueless decal removal.
We don’t cut corners — premium materials only
1940
Established
3
Generations
8
NJ counties served
0
Days your truck spends at a shop
Three generations of trucks
A selection from our gallery — pickups to tractor trailers to municipal fleets.
Work van — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Box truck and trailer — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Box truck and trailer — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Heavy-duty truck — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Heavy-duty truck — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Custom sign — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Public service vehicle — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Pickup truck — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Pickup truck — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Work van — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Work van — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Box truck and trailer — Lombardo Lettering, NJ
Why businesses keep calling us
Three generations, one phone number, no drop-off.
We come to you
Premium film only
Since 1940
DOT-ready lettering
Talk to the family, not a call center
Ask for Frank. He has been doing this longer than most of our competitors have been in business.
Shop: 95 W Main St, Chester, New Jersey 07930
Email: franksignguy@yahoo.com
Coverage: Morris, Essex, Warren, Union, Bergen, Somerset, Sussex & Hunterdon counties
Three generations on West Main Street
Lombardo Lettering has been a family sign business in Chester, New Jersey since 1940. Three generations have run it, and the working method — the shop comes to the customer — has stayed the same through the move from hand-painted lettering to cut vinyl and digital wraps.
The craft has changed more than the business has. The first generation worked with brushes, One Shot enamel and a steady hand; a truck was lettered by someone standing at the panel drawing the letters. That skill set — layout by eye, spacing that reads right at speed, knowing how big a letter has to be to be seen from across a street — did not stop being relevant when the tools changed.
Cut vinyl arrived and made reproduction exact. Large-format printing arrived and made photographic wraps possible. What both did was remove the limits on what could be put on a vehicle, which made judgement about what *should* be put on a vehicle more important, not less.
We still work out of Chester, we still go to the customer, and the person who quotes your job is the person who will letter your truck.
What being mobile actually changes
It changes who absorbs the downtime. A fixed shop asks you to give up the vehicle for days; a mobile shop absorbs the travel instead and gives you the vehicle back the same afternoon.
That is not a small operational difference for a business whose vehicle is how the work gets done. It is the reason a one-truck contractor can afford to have the truck lettered properly at all, and the reason a ten-vehicle fleet can be re-branded without two weeks of disruption.
It also changes what we can see. Working at your yard means we see the vehicle in the condition it lives in — the wash regime, where it parks, what the panels have been through. That informs what film goes on it and where.
Questions about working with us
Where are you based?
Chester, New Jersey — 95 W Main St. We work across Morris, Essex, Bergen, Union, Somerset, Warren, Sussex and Hunterdon counties.
Do you have a showroom?
No, and deliberately. The work happens at your address. Photographs of previous jobs are in the gallery.
How far back do your records go?
We keep specifications for fleet customers indefinitely, which is how a truck added years later still matches.
What more than eighty-five years of doing this teaches you
That the design decisions matter more than the equipment. A plotter will cut whatever it is told to cut; knowing what to tell it — how big the phone number has to be, which color survives a New Jersey summer on a black panel, where a graphic will be scuffed by ladders — is the part that took generations to learn.
Hand-painted lettering imposed a discipline that vinyl quietly removed. When every letter cost time to draw, nobody put a paragraph on a truck. The result was vehicles that said one name, one trade and one number, in characters big enough to read from across a junction. Digital production made it effortless to add more, and a great many trucks on the road now carry text nobody has ever read.
So the first thing we still do on every job is take things off the design. What has to be legible at forty miles an hour is the name, the trade and the phone number. Everything else — the certifications, the service list, the social handles — earns its place only if it does not compete with those three.
The second is material choice, and this is where a local shop has an advantage no catalogue reproduces. We know what a decal does after four winters of road salt on a plow truck, because we lettered that plow truck and we see it every year. Film selection here is based on vehicles we have watched age, not on a warranty document.
The third is knowing when to say no. Tonal grey-on-black lettering looks superb in a proof and fails the legibility requirement on a regulated vehicle. A full wrap on a truck the customer is selling in eighteen months is money spent in the wrong place. Turning down the more expensive option is how a business stays in one town for three generations.
The shop, the truck and the way we work
The shop in Chester does design, cutting and printing. The truck does the rest — it carries everything needed to prepare, apply and finish a vehicle at your location, so the work happens where your vehicles already are.
Design and proofing
Artwork drawn or redrawn in the shop, then laid onto a scale drawing of your actual vehicle before anything is produced.
Cutting and printing
Cut vinyl for lettering and logos; large-format print for photographic graphics and full wraps.
Weeding and masking
The slow part of a vinyl job, done at a bench under good light rather than in a windy yard.
Surface preparation
Wash, degrease and dry the panel on site. The single biggest determinant of how long the graphic lasts.
Application
Applied at your yard, with heat where the shape needs it, and post-heated on curves so it stays down.
Aftercare
We tell you when it can be washed, what not to point a pressure washer at, and what to call us about.
Where you will find us working
Chester is home, and the working radius covers eight New Jersey counties: Morris, Essex, Union, Bergen, Somerset, Sussex, Warren and Hunterdon. Anything inside that we treat as a normal day.
The radius is set by what can be reached and returned from in a working day. See the full service area, or send photos of your vehicle and we will tell you when we can be there.
We’ll make ya’ famous
Call 973-214-2292 to get started.
Areas we serve across New Jersey
Eight counties. Pick yours to see the towns we cover. Mobile truck lettering, wraps and signs — we come to your yard.
Find us in Chester, NJ
Our shop is at 95 W Main Street, Chester, New Jersey 07930 — but for lettering and wraps, we come to you.
Our mobile service area
Eight counties across northern and western New Jersey, covered by our own trucks.