Today we’d like to introduce you to Guilherme Britto.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was born and raised in the south of Brazil – a small city in the Serra Gaucha with deep northern Italian roots, which is where my family comes from.
I started in design in 2010, and I learned the trade from the production floor up: prepress, color, materials, what actually happens when a file hits a press. In 2013 I took over a small shop and rebuilt it as Agencia Sinai Comunicacao Visual, doing vinyl lettering and large-format printing. It doubled in size twice. Then Brazil’s economic crisis hit in 2015. I held on through 2016, but in 2017 I had to downsize the operation and keep the company running as a side business while I worked as communications advisor at the city council in Bento Gonçalves.
Alongside all of that, for years I worked in adventure sports on weekends – rafting, canyoning, rappel and zip lines – and I helped train firefighters in rope rescue and swiftwater rescue. It started as a hobby and turned into weekend work, and it ran in parallel with my design career for a long time. It sounds unrelated to printing, but it taught me two things I use every day: how to work with my hands under pressure, and how to be obsessive about the details that keep a job safe.
In December 2017 I moved to Southwest Florida and started over from zero. I joined a small print shop doing custom apparel and ended up running their sign division for close to four years. In 2019 I started Brittoprint on the side – nights and weekends – and in August 2022 I finally went all-in and took it full time.
Two months later, Hurricane Ian destroyed everything I had just invested in. For several months I kept the company running on outsourced production, and at the beginning of 2023 I was able to buy back part of my own machinery and run the whole operation out of a friend’s garage. In September 2023 we opened the shop we’re in today, in Lehigh Acres. Brittoprint is now a full print and sign operation – vehicle wraps, channel letters, banners, DTF apparel, laser cutting and engraving, all produced in-house.
I also still write. Since 2025 I’ve been contributing articles to the Business section of Jornal Design Serra back in Brazil, which keeps me thinking about the craft and not only the production.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No. Not even close. I’ve started over twice – once by choice, and once because a hurricane made the decision for me.
The first restart was Brazil. I spent years building a shop that doubled in size twice, and then the national economic crisis hit in 2015. I held on through 2016, and by 2017 I had to downsize it to a side business and take a job to keep going. The second was moving to Southwest Florida, where I had no English, no network and no reputation. You go from being the person people call to being the person making the calls.
Then came the one I never saw coming. In August 2022, after nearly four years of running Brittoprint nights and weekends, I finally went full time. Equipment ordered, pipeline built, all-in. Two months later, Hurricane Ian came through Southwest Florida as a Category 5. Every piece of equipment, every roll of vinyl, every machine – submerged. Everything I had just bet on was gone about eight weeks after I bet it.
I decided not to close. For several months I kept the business alive on outsourced production – everything we sold was made on somebody else’s machines – so my customers were never left without anyone. At the beginning of 2023 I managed to buy back part of my own equipment, and I ran the entire operation out of a friend’s garage. In September 2023 we opened the permanent shop in Lehigh Acres.
On top of that, this is an equipment-heavy trade – every step up in what you can offer costs real money, and you usually buy the machine before you have the work to justify it. And the technical side is unforgiving: a wrap that fails in the Florida sun, a channel letter that doesn’t pass permitting, an apparel run with the wrong color profile. Those mistakes are expensive and public. I learned permitting, substrates and color management the hard way, and that knowledge is now one of the main reasons clients stay with us.
If Ian taught me anything, it’s that the equipment is not the business. The business is the relationships and the knowledge – and those don’t flood.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Brittoprint is a full-service print and sign shop based in the Fort Myers area, serving Southwest Florida.
What we do: vehicle wraps and fleet graphics, illuminated channel letters and dimensional signage, monument and wall signs, banners and large-format printing, DTF apparel and custom branded merchandise, and laser cutting and engraving.
What sets us apart is that we are design-led. I’m a graphic designer with about 16 years of experience – not a print broker who bought a machine. Most shops will produce whatever file you send them. We look at the file first and tell you what is going to fail: the color that won’t hold up in the Florida sun, the letter size that won’t read from the road, the layout that won’t survive the curve of a vehicle. A lot of our work comes from customers who got burned somewhere else.
We also keep the job in-house from start to finish – design, permitting, production and installation. When a client needs a monument sign, we handle the drawings and the permit application, not just the panel. That continuity is why we get trusted with everything from a single barbershop wall sign to full commercial signage packages.
This shop was rebuilt from nothing after Hurricane Ian put every machine we owned under water in 2022, so we understand what it means when a local business needs to reopen and needs signage on the door yesterday. We move fast because we have been on that side of it.
What I’m most proud of, brand-wise, is that Brittoprint looks and behaves like a design studio that happens to own industrial equipment. Clients get the care of a boutique studio with the capacity of a production shop.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Around here, I think three things shape the next 5-10 years.
The first is growth. Southwest Florida keeps building – new plazas, new medical offices, new restaurants – and every one of them needs signage that has to be designed, permitted, engineered and installed. That work cannot be ordered online and shipped in a box. I think that’s exactly where local shops end up: the complex, permitted, installed jobs, while banners and yard signs go almost entirely to the online mass producers.
The second is commercial wraps and fleet graphics, and I think this is the most underused marketing channel a local business has. A wrapped van or truck costs less than a few months of online ads, and then it works every single day for five to seven years with no monthly bill – parked at the job site, sitting in traffic, in the customer’s driveway while your crew is inside. Nothing else in marketing comes close on cost per impression. As digital ad costs keep climbing, I expect contractors, service companies and local brands to move real budget back into vehicles and storefronts. We’re already seeing it: clients who started with one wrapped van are now coming back to wrap the whole fleet.
The third is AI. I see it as a tool that shortens the creative front end – clients often arrive with the concept already formed, sometimes with an image to go with it. What it doesn’t shorten is the production side. AI output still isn’t there for large format: the resolution doesn’t survive the side of a box truck or a twenty-foot wall, and because it’s a raster image and not a vector, it limits what we can do with it – we can’t cut it, scale it cleanly, or break it into the parts a channel letter or a cut-vinyl job needs.
And even after a layout is approved, there’s a step most people never see: prepress. That’s where a drawing becomes a product – color management so what looks right on a screen still holds up in the Florida sun, files built for the specific material and machine, bleeds, cut paths, panel tiling. That’s the mechanical work AI doesn’t touch, and it’s still done by people who know the machines. I care about it enough that I’m writing a book about it.
And after Ian, I’d add one more that isn’t really a trend: around here everyone learned that the sign on your door is how people know you’re back. That’s not going out of style.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://brittoprint.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brittoprint/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brittoprintofficial
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbritto
