Case Study: How Suds & Shine turned its forecourt into a sales engine with PosterBooking

The Client

Suds & Shine opened in 2016 on a corner plot just off the A38 in Birmingham, offering hand car washes, interior valeting, waxing and a small range of add-on services like alloy wheel cleaning and engine bay degreasing. The business employs twelve staff across two shifts, seven days a week, and serves roughly 180 to 220 vehicles on a typical weekend day.

Like most independent car washes, Suds & Shine competes on speed, visible quality and price clarity. Customers often decide which package to buy in the ten or fifteen seconds it takes to pull up to the booth, so what they see on arrival matters enormously. The owner, Priya Shah, had run the business with her brother since it opened, gradually adding services as demand grew, but the way those services were communicated to customers had barely changed since day one.

The car wash operates year-round, including through rain, frost and the inevitable fading that direct sunlight causes to anything printed and left outdoors. That environmental reality shaped almost every decision the business later made about signage.

Life Before PosterBooking

Before PosterBooking, Suds & Shine ran its pricing and promotions entirely on physical materials. A large hand-painted price board stood at the entrance to the forecourt, repainted by a local sign writer roughly twice a year at a cost of around £180 each time. Inside the pay booth, staff kept a laminated A4 menu of wash packages and add-ons, updated by printing a new sheet and re-laminating it whenever prices or offers changed, which happened on average every six to eight weeks.

Seasonal promotions, such as a winter undercarriage wash or a summer wax bundle, were handled with A-board signs that staff wheeled out each morning and back in each evening. These boards were handwritten with chalk pens or printed on a home inkjet printer and slid into a plastic sleeve, which did little to stop rain streaking the ink within days. Priya estimated the business replaced these printed inserts two to three times a month, at roughly £15 to £25 per batch once paper, ink cartridges and laminating pouches were counted, adding up to around £55 a month in consumables alone.

Beyond the direct material cost, the real drain was staff time. Every Monday morning, the duty manager spent 30 to 45 minutes checking which boards had faded, needed reprinting or had blown over in the wind. Updating prices across the four different display points (entrance board, pay booth menu, waiting area poster and a chalkboard by the till) took a further 40 minutes of walking back and forth, re-pinning, re-taping and double-checking nothing had been missed. When a new promotion launched, that process could take closer to an hour because wording had to be re-typed, printed, cut to size and physically mounted.

Staff also found themselves verbally upselling at the till because customers rarely looked up from their phones to notice a laminated sheet taped to the counter. "We were basically shouting the offers at people while they were paying," Priya said of that period. "Half the time they'd already decided on the cheapest wash before we got the words out." Add it all up and Suds & Shine was losing close to 5 hours of staff time a week to printing, updating and manually promoting its own services, on top of roughly £235 a month in print, paint and laminating costs.

There was also a reliability problem. During a busy bank holiday weekend, a new seasonal offer was meant to go live on a Saturday morning, but the printer at home jammed and the laminator pouch supply ran out, meaning the promotion didn't actually appear until the Monday after the holiday rush had passed, a lost opportunity the team couldn't easily quantify but felt keenly.

The Solution

Priya's business partner came across PosterBooking while searching for a way to manage screens remotely without hiring an IT contractor. The appeal was straightforward: a cloud-based dashboard that let the team design, schedule and push content to every screen on site from a phone or laptop, without printing, laminating or physically touching a single display once it was mounted.

PosterBooking's free plan, which covers up to 10 screens, matched the size of the business immediately, since Suds & Shine only needed four displays to cover its whole site. The team could build playlists for pricing, seasonal offers and loyalty promotions, schedule them to change automatically by day or time, and update everything in seconds if a price changed or a machine went out of service.

Where They Implemented It

Suds & Shine installed four screens across the site, each with a specific job to do.

A large weatherproof outdoor-rated screen went on the forecourt entrance canopy, replacing the hand-painted price board. It displays the full wash and valet price list on a loop, rotating every 20 seconds with a seasonal promotion banner and the day's queue-time estimate.

A second screen sits inside the pay booth window, facing customers as they pull up to pay. This screen runs the upsell menu: add-on wheel cleaning, air freshener upgrades, interior vacuum packages and the loyalty stamp card balance, all shown as customers are already reaching for their wallets.

In the small customer waiting area, where people sometimes sit for ten minutes while their car is finished, a third screen plays a longer-form playlist mixing service information, before-and-after valet photos, local weather and a short loop promoting the monthly subscription wash plan.

A fourth screen was mounted behind the till inside the reception kiosk, facing staff rather than customers, showing daily targets, shift handover notes and any urgent operational alerts, so the team no longer needs a separate whiteboard for internal updates.

The Implementation

The rollout used Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K devices for all four screens, chosen because they were cheap, widely available and simple to plug into the HDMI ports on the existing commercial displays the business already owned. Installing the PosterBooking app on each stick took about 2 minutes per screen: plug in, connect to the site's WiFi, download the app from the store and log in with the business's PosterBooking account.

Once all four sticks were registered to the same dashboard, Priya's brother built the initial playlists in an afternoon, using PosterBooking's templates for pricing boards and promotional banners rather than designing from scratch. Staff needed roughly 15 minutes of training to understand how to check a screen's status and swap a playlist if needed, since day-to-day content changes are handled centrally by the two owners rather than by till staff.

The forecourt screen required an enclosure rated for outdoor use, which was the only additional hardware cost beyond the display and the Fire TV Stick itself. Everything else, from scheduling to content design, happened inside the PosterBooking dashboard with no additional software or contractor involvement.

Life With PosterBooking

Today, when prices change or a new seasonal wash package launches, Priya updates the playlist once in the dashboard and it pushes to all relevant screens within moments, with no printing, driving to a sign shop or standing outside pinning up a new poster. Promotions can be scheduled in advance, so a bank holiday offer is queued up a week ahead of time and switches on automatically at the right hour without anyone needing to remember on the day.

The team has also started using scheduling to run different content at different times: a breakfast-rush quick wash promotion plays from 7am to 10am, switching automatically to a full valet upsell playlist for the quieter midday period, then back to a "beat the weekend queue" message on Saturday mornings.

Staff reaction has been straightforwardly positive. The pay booth screen in particular has changed how upselling happens: rather than staff needing to remember and recite every add-on option, the screen does the talking, and staff simply ask "would you like to add the wheel clean you can see on screen" rather than running through a full list from memory. Several staff have told Priya they feel less awkward upselling now that the screen prompts the conversation rather than them having to initiate it cold.

The Results: Time and Money Saved

The shift from printed and painted signage to PosterBooking's cloud dashboard produced measurable savings in both time and cost, alongside a noticeable uplift in add-on sales.

• Weekly admin and sign-updating time fell from around 5 hours to under 45 minutes, a saving of roughly 4 hours a week
• Annualised, that is more than 200 hours of staff time freed up per year, equivalent to five full working weeks
• Monthly spend on printing, laminating and sign repainting dropped from around £235 to under £20, a saving of roughly £215 a month, or close to £2,580 a year
• Add-on and upsell sales (wheel cleaning, interior packages, air freshener upgrades) rose noticeably after the pay booth screen was installed, which Priya attributes directly to customers seeing the options rather than relying on staff to mention them
• Monthly subscription wash plan sign-ups increased after the waiting area screen began promoting the plan on a loop, giving waiting customers something concrete to consider while they sat and watched their car being finished

Beyond the numbers, Priya said the business feels more professional and consistent now, since every screen always shows current, correctly spelled, on-brand pricing rather than relying on whoever last updated a laminated sheet to have got it right.

Testimonial

"We used to spend half of Monday morning just checking what had faded or blown away overnight. Now I update a price once on my phone and it's live on all four screens before I've even got to the car wash. The pay booth screen alone has made upselling feel natural instead of awkward for my staff."

Priya Shah, Co-Owner, Suds & Shine

Frequently Asked Questions

Is PosterBooking free to use for a small car wash with only a few screens?

Yes. PosterBooking is free for up to 10 screens, which comfortably covers a site like Suds & Shine's four displays. A watermark appears on free screens once the first 3 months of use have passed, but the core scheduling, design and remote update features remain fully available.

What hardware do we need to run PosterBooking on our existing screens?

Most businesses use an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K or Amazon Signage Stick plugged into the HDMI port of any standard commercial or consumer display. PosterBooking also runs on Android TV devices, Windows PCs, Chromebox units and Raspberry Pi, so you can use whatever hardware suits your site and budget.

How long does it actually take to get a screen up and running?

Setup typically takes about 2 minutes per screen: plug in the device, connect it to WiFi, install the PosterBooking app and sign in. There is no need for a technician visit or specialist IT knowledge, which is how Suds & Shine's owners managed the entire rollout themselves in an afternoon.

What happens if our WiFi goes down or drops out on the forecourt?

PosterBooking caches content directly on each device, so screens continue playing their scheduled playlists even if the internet connection drops temporarily. Once connectivity is restored, the screen automatically syncs with any updates made in the dashboard.

Once we have more than 10 screens, how much does it cost to expand?

Beyond the free tier, additional screens cost $6.49 per screen per month starting from the 11th screen. That means a growing business, such as a car wash group adding a second or third site, can scale its signage network without a complicated licensing structure or a big upfront software cost.

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