Soccer fans traveling to the 2026 global soccer celebration have a reason to stop in Skagit County this summer. Six towns, including Concrete, Sedro-Woolley, Anacortes, Mount Vernon, Burlington and La Conner, have installed large block-letter signs spelling out their names built by Janicki. With Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, hosting matches in June and July, the signs invite visitors to stop, take a photo and explore the towns between games.
How we built them
Janicki was approached by the Skagit Tourism Bureau in early 2026 to create large letters for each city’s name. Project managers and engineers developed initial concepts calling for 48-inch fiberglass letters designed to last well beyond the event. Leadership liked the direction but wanted to go bigger, and the team settled on 60-inch letters.
The process started with fabricating 40-by-10-foot composite panels using vacuum infusion, drawing vinyl ester resin through
multiple layers of fiberglass reinforcement surrounding a 1.5-inch perforated PET core. After curing, the panels moved to a 12-by-40-foot waterjet, where lettering for each city was precision cut at 90,000 psi. Each letter was then edge-sanded, cleaned and sealed with a vinyl ester resin mixture to encapsulate all exposed edges, finish-sanded to 150 grit and prepared for delivery.
Manufacturing and delivering the letters required approximately 300 hours of work across multiple day and weekend shifts, with about 20 employees contributing across production, transportation and engineering.
Where they are now
The signs are installed in town parks across Skagit County, out in the open for neighbors and visitors alike. The La Conner sign is a good example of how they work. Artist Kevin Hartman decorated them with a soccer ball pattern, the phrase “WHAT WE LOVE ABOUT LA CONNER” and QR codes pointing to the Skagit Tourism Bureau. Chalk sits at the base, and the letters are meant to be drawn on. Within a day of installation, the community had already covered the sign with notes and doodles.
The Sedro-Woolley letters take a different approach. The signs are custom wrapped with imagery reflecting the town’s character, including local themes and industries. Several letters also carry soccer-related designs, among them a soccer ball O motif tying the signs back to the 2026 global soccer celebration.
Visitors are encouraged to find all six signs, take photos and post them with the hashtag #MagicSkagit for a chance to win a prize. The first of six Seattle matches, Belgium against Egypt, is scheduled for June 15.
A different kind of build
Janicki spends most of its time building composite and metallic tooling and structures for aerospace, defense, space and marine customers, work that rarely ends up somewhere the public can walk right up and touch. This project brought our work to our communities, available for anyone to lean on, write on and pose in front of.
“We’re proud to call Skagit County home,” said John Janicki, President of Janicki. “It is exciting for our employees to contribute to a project with such a lasting impact in our communities.”
The signs are a small reminder that the same team that builds for customers around the world is also part of this community. We hope visitors enjoy them, snap a few photos and take some time to see what Skagit County has to offer.
Interested in working on projects like this? Visit our Job Openings page to explore current opportunities.