101223 Bakers' Opens Doors to Students to Educate and Inspire

On Thursday, Bakers' Signs and Manufacturing, on FM 1485, continued their annual tradition of recognizing Manufacturing Day by hosting over 100 high school students and educating them about the industry.
The Caney Creek High School students were divided into small groups and rotated through the various areas of the Baker Signs facility, where employees explained and demonstrated their jobs, in addition to answering questions.
Bakers' employee Esau Merlin, who works in vinyl signage, was a high school student who participated in the program in 2018 and found his calling in signs.

“I just thought getting the graphics and making it happen was pretty cool – that’s what got me interested,” Merlin said. “The opportunity that matt gave me kinda pushed me to do it more.”

Merlin said some students already knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives by then, but he was not one of them.

‘Never in a million years had I thought about going into the sign industry,” he said. “There’s so many signs around us - We never stop to think about who makes these signs, but it’s pretty interesting.”

Longtime Bakers' Signs employee Thomas Turner said the annual event began with the International Sign Association, and others, who wanted to “engage students and give them a firsthand glimpse at what manufacturing really is.”

“It’s filled with a multitude of different careers, different positions, different roles for people that work within that industry,” Turner said.

Since Bakers' began inviting students to learn about manufacturing annually, Turner says they’ve hired several. Three were hired as soon as they graduated from high school and several more worked there while attending college to expand their horizons in the industry.

“I think it’s very enlightening and eye opening for students that just don’t really know what path they’re going to take,” he said.

Bakers' Signs was started by Bonnie Baker in 1985, while she was still raising children, and has since grown into a mammoth business occupying 35 acres. The business creates, manufactures, and erects signs all over Texas and surrounding states. They’ve also traveled to non-adjacent states, such as Utah and Missouri. They do everything from small signs to gigantic letters, hung one letter at a time on the sides of high-rise buildings, hundreds of feet in the air.

“We’ve got a lot of things at our disposal that allow us to do just about anything that’s sign related,” Turner said.

If their trucks won’t reach the required height, they have installers who rappel from rooftops.

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