Frequently Asked Questions
Main St. Group is a retail execution company, founded in 1974. We design, source, project manage, warehouse and deliver retail programs for beverage and consumer brands across North America. We work from Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and New York.
About Main St. Group
What does Main St. Group do?
We take retail programs from concept to store floor. Point of sale, secondary packaging, retail merchandising, promotional campaigns, fulfillment, logistics and warehousing.
One party stays accountable for the whole chain — us.
What industries does Main St. Group specialize in?
Beverage alcohol, mostly. Wine, spirits, beer and ready to drink. Alongside that, functional food and beverage, and consumer packaged goods more broadly.
Two specialist teams sit inside Main St. Corktown works with independent beer, wine and spirits brands. Highline works with functional food and beverage brands.
Where are Main St. Group’s offices?
Four of them. Toronto is our head office, at 640 Main St., Woodstock, Ontario, N4S 8Y5. We also work from Vancouver, San Francisco and New York.
We run programs across Canada and the United States from those four. So if you’re sourcing POP or POS displays in Toronto, the GTA, Vancouver or anywhere else in North America, that’s the footprint.
How long has Main St. Group been in business?
Since 1974. The first purchase order was PO#2320.
What are Corktown and Highline?
Corktown is Main St.’s specialist team for independent beer, wine and spirits brands. Highline is Main St.’s specialist team for functional food and beverage brands.
Both sit inside Main St. Group and draw on the same production and logistics chain. So a smaller brand gets specialist attention without losing the scale behind it.
About retail displays
What is a POP display?
A point of purchase display is a standalone fixture that presents a product somewhere other than its usual shelf position. An end cap, a floor stand, a countertop unit, a pallet display, a shipper.
The point is placement. A shopper walking down the aisle toward the shelf is already looking for something. A shopper walking past a POP display isn’t — which is why the display has about three seconds to give them a reason to stop.
That’s the whole job. Interrupt, explain and make picking it up easy.
What is the difference between a POP display and a POS display?
Not much, and the industry uses the two interchangeably.
Strictly speaking, point of purchase covers anywhere in the store where a shopper can decide to buy. Point of sale is narrower — the checkout area specifically. In practice you’ll hear both terms used for the same fixture, and we do it ourselves.
If someone draws a hard line between them in a brief, ask which they mean. Usually they mean a display.
Working with us
How does a project start?
With an enquiry through this site, then a conversation with our business development team. There’s no form to fill in first.
Three things help us move quickly: what you’re trying to achieve, which retailers are involved and when it needs to be in store.
What information do you need from me?
The retailers you’re targeting, the in-store date, the product dimensions and any packaging or compliance constraints. If you have the retailer’s floor plan, that shortens everything.
Do you know the retailer’s display specs?
Some of them, and we’ll get the rest.
We hold specs for a number of the major chains. Where we don’t have them, or where you don’t have access at brief stage, we’ll go and obtain them.
Worth settling early. A display that misses the footprint gets turned away at the door, and that isn’t a conversation you want three weeks out from the in-store date.
What happens after I make an enquiry?
It goes to our business development team, and someone will be in touch within one business day.
The first conversation is short. What are you trying to achieve? Which retailers are involved? When does it need to be in store? Those three answers tell us quickly whether we’re the right fit and what the program would take.
Who is my point of contact?
Every account gets an account director and an account manager.
Day to day, you’re dealing with the account manager. The account director stays across the program throughout, so there’s always a second person who knows your account.
Can we see a sample before production?
Yes. A white sample and design proofs, on every program.
No extra charge for it, and it sits inside the normal lead time rather than on top of it. The only things that move a date are slow approvals, or changes once you’ve seen the sample.
Timelines and cost
How long does a retail display program take?
Where it’s made drives the timeline more than anything else.
Domestic manufacture typically runs 6 to 10 weeks from brief to delivery. Offshore runs 12 to 16.
Worth settling early, because it’s usually the difference between hitting a reset window and missing it.
How much does a POS display program cost?
It depends on four things: display type, materials, volume and how many stores you’re reaching.
Typical per-unit ranges:
Temporary countertop, corrugated: $10 to $20
Temporary floor stand, reinforced corrugated: $30 to $80
Semi-permanent display, corrugated or PVC plastic: $60 to $150
Permanent fixture, metal, wood or acrylic: $100 to $500+
That’s only part of the picture. Tooling, freight, warehousing and installation all sit on top, and they spread across the run. A 500-unit program carries a lower cost per store than a 50-unit one built to the same design.
Which is why we’d rather you judged it on cost per store executed than cost per unit produced. A cheap display sitting in a warehouse costs more than an expensive one on a floor.
What makes a display cost more?
Four things move the number, and three of them are settled before anything gets produced.
Material and structure. A permanent metal fixture carries tooling that a corrugate promotional unit doesn’t.
Volume. Tooling and setup spread across the run, so short runs carry a higher cost per unit.
Complexity. Multi-part assembly, applied graphics and unusual footprints add cost twice: once in production, again in build time at store.
Retailer count. More retailers means more footprint variants, more freight lanes and more delivery windows to hit.
Is there a minimum order quantity?
No hard minimum. Efficiency sets the practical floor, and it’s different depending on what you’re building.
Corrugated displays usually make sense from around 100 units. Print and setup costs spread across the run, so shorter runs carry a high cost per unit.
Permanent displays work from around 25 to 30. The unit value is higher, so fewer units still justify the tooling.
Below those numbers we’ll still talk — just expect the cost per unit to climb.
Can you work to a fixed budget?
Yes, and honestly it’s often the faster route.
Give us the parameters and the number, and we’ll work backwards from it. Material, format, volume and finish all have room in them. Knowing the ceiling early means we spend the design effort inside it rather than around it.
A fixed budget isn’t a smaller version of the brief. It’s a clearer one.
Capabilities
Do you handle production in-house?
No, and that’s deliberate.
We handle fulfillment, kitting, packaging and assembly ourselves, in our own facilities in Canada and the US. Manufacturing is a different question. We source it across a vetted vendor base, so every build goes to the producer with the right equipment for that particular job.
Here’s why that matters. A single factory can only make what its machines allow — which quietly bends the design to fit the equipment. Managing procurement across specialists means the equipment fits the design instead. It usually takes cost out of the program too, rather than adding a margin to it.
What doesn’t change is who answers for it. That’s us.
Do you handle warehousing and delivery?
Yes. Scalable warehousing, inventory management and nationwide distribution, so displays and campaign assets arrive on time and retail ready.
Do you install displays in store?
Not with our own crews. We have partners who can facilitate installation where a program needs it.
What we own is getting the display to the store, retail ready and on time. Where SmartScan is in play, the setup scan records that it arrived where it was meant to.
Do you design it, or do we supply the artwork?
Both ways work.
Most brands find it faster to have us design it. We have engineers on staff, so a display gets drawn with the end product in mind rather than handed to production and re-worked. That usually takes time and cost out.
If you have an agency or an in-house design team you want to keep, that’s fine. We supply die lines and they work to them.
How do you handle cross-border shipping and duties?
We handle it.
We produce in both countries, and customs and cross-border shipping run through our own logistics team. You don’t broker anything.
Who owns the design and the tooling?
You own the design once it’s paid for. Tooling stays with us.
That’s the split, and we’d rather be clear about it up front. The creative is yours. The dies live here, so the next run doesn’t start from zero.
Can you work across Canada and the United States?
Yes. Four offices across North America, and programs running in both markets.
Do you work with small or emerging brands?
Yes, through Corktown, our specialist team for independent beer, wine and spirits brands. Several of our strongest client relationships started on the ground floor and grew from there.
The fit is about direction rather than size. If a brand is working toward regional or national distribution, we can start small and scale with it. If the plan is to stay in a handful of local doors, another supplier will serve you better.
Materials and sustainability
What materials are retail displays made from, and are they recyclable?
Corrugated, reinforced corrugated, PVC and other plastics, metal, wood and acrylic. Which one you use comes down to how long the display needs to live.
Corrugated is widely recyclable and cheap to tool, and it wears out fast in a busy store. Permanent units in metal or wood last years, which spreads their footprint across many campaigns, but they cost more to ship and are harder to dispose of.
One thing worth knowing, because it catches people out: single-substrate construction recycles most reliably. Coatings, laminates and mixed materials are usually what stop a corrugated display being recyclable in practice, even when the board itself would be.
What happens to a display when the campaign ends?
It depends on the format, and it’s worth deciding before the display is built rather than after.
Temporary units get broken down and recycled at store level. That only works if there’s actually a route for it. A display can be recyclable in principle and still end up in landfill because nobody at the store knew what to do with it.
Permanent and semi-permanent fixtures get retrieved, refurbished and redeployed, or held in storage for the next campaign. We can handle retrieval and warehousing as part of the program.
Here’s the part brands get backwards. A durable unit running for three years often carries a lower footprint than several corrugated rebuilds, because each rebuild carries its own tooling, printing and freight. That flips completely when the promotion is a six-week seasonal window. Building for three years gains nothing then.
Measurement
How do you prove a display worked?
Further than most suppliers go, and not as far as we’d like. Here’s the honest version.
If your program uses SmartScan, we can tell you the display reached the store it was meant to reach, and when. That sounds like a low bar until you notice how few brands can answer it about their own campaigns. Displays ship, invoices get paid, and nobody knows how many actually made the floor.
What comes after that — lift, ROI, the number your finance team asks for — is a harder problem, and we’re not going to pretend we’ve solved it. We’re working on it. For now, arrival at the right door is what we can show you, and it beats shipping and hoping.
What is SmartScan?
A QR code we apply to your display before it leaves our warehouse.
Whoever sets the display up scans it and gets step-by-step assembly instructions on their phone. Not a folded paper sheet nobody reads.
That same scan records the display reached the store, with a time and a location attached. Which is how arrival stops being an assumption.
Who we are not right for
What kinds of projects are not a good fit?
Four, and we’d rather say so early than waste your time.
Brands with no ambition beyond a local footprint. Size isn’t the issue — direction is. We’re built for brands moving toward regional or national distribution, and several of our strongest relationships started small and grew from there.
Direct-to-consumer only businesses. Our work happens in retail environments, in front of a shopper standing in a store.
Anything outside North America. We run from Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and New York.
Buying on unit price alone. We’re not the cheapest per unit and don’t try to be. If the decision comes down to the lowest quoted price, another supplier will win it.
If your question isn’t answered here, just ask us directly.
It Happens Here.