Plan to place your first plate frame order as soon as the new store's name, logo, and contact details are final — ideally 4 to 6 weeks before the doors open, to cover Frontline Frames' 2-to-3 week production lead time with room for a design revision if the first proof needs a change. Order late in the rollout and you're delivering vehicles with no branded frame on opening week.
Here's the timeline from deal close to delivery-ready inventory, and what changes between a ground-up new point and a newly acquired existing store.
How do you plan a plate frame rollout for a new or acquired store?
Work backward from the opening or transition date: lock the branding, place the order with enough lead time to cover production and a possible revision, and have stock on the shelf before the first vehicle delivery under the new name. The frame order is a small line item in a much larger rollout, but it's one of the few with a hard, external lead time you can't compress by working harder.
Everything else in a rooftop launch — staffing, inventory, signage — has more flexibility to slip a few days. A frame order placed too late simply doesn't arrive in time, regardless of how the rest of the launch goes.
What's the timeline from deal close to delivery-day frames?
Branding decisions typically finalize well before the physical transition, which is the window to place the frame order — not the transition date itself.
| Milestone | Typical timing before opening | Frame-related action |
|---|---|---|
| Deal closes / franchise awarded | Months out, varies by deal | None yet — branding not final |
| Name, logo, and contact info finalized | 4–8 weeks out | Build design and place order |
| Production and shipping | 2–3 weeks after order | In production |
| Stock arrives, staff briefed | 1–2 weeks before opening | Confirm quantity and install process |
| Doors open / first deliveries | Day one | Frames installed on every delivered vehicle |
What has to happen before you can order?
The name, logo file, and contact details need to be locked — not "close to final," since a mid-production change means a second order and a second lead time. If the new rooftop's branding depends on a franchise agreement or OEM approval, confirm that sign-off is complete before finalizing the frame design.
If OEM brand standards apply to the new logo — which they generally do for a franchised point — build that confirmation into this step rather than discovering it after the order ships. See our guide on meeting OEM brand standards on dealer plate frames.
How far ahead should you place the first order?
At least 4 weeks before the date you need stock on hand, which covers the 2-to-3 week production lead time plus a buffer for a design revision or shipping variance. Six weeks is more comfortable if the opening date has any flexibility to shift earlier.
A new rooftop with a firm public opening date is the one situation where cutting the timeline close is genuinely risky — there's no existing stock to fall back on the way an established store might have.
What quantity should a new rooftop start with?
Enough to cover your first 60 to 90 days of projected deliveries, sized from comparable volume at a similar rooftop rather than a guess — a newly acquired store has recent sales history to pull from; a ground-up new point has to estimate from the franchise's typical volume for that market size.
- Newly acquired store with sales history: use the prior owner's recent monthly delivery average
- Ground-up new point: estimate from comparable rooftops in similar markets, then adjust after the first real month
- Either case: set your ongoing par level once you have one real month of data — see our guide on setting par levels so plate frame inventory never runs out
How do you handle the gap before new frames arrive?
If the opening date is fixed and the order timeline is tight, deliver without a frame rather than with an incorrect one, and install frames as soon as stock arrives — even retroactively isn't necessary, since a frame is added at delivery, not manufactured into the car. There's no interim frame worth using for a brand-new rooftop; a frame from the wrong entity is worse than none.
This is different from a rebrand, where old stock exists and has to be actively pulled from circulation — see our guide on what to do with plate frames when your dealership rebrands for that situation.
What's different about a newly acquired store versus a ground-up new point?
An acquired store likely has existing frame inventory under the old branding that needs to stop circulating immediately, plus real sales history to size the new order from. A ground-up new point has neither problem — no old stock to retire, but also no history to estimate volume from.
Acquired stores should treat this as a rebrand situation for the outgoing brand and a rollout situation for the incoming one, running both processes at once rather than treating it as a simple reorder.
Who coordinates the rollout across departments?
Usually whoever is managing the broader rooftop launch or acquisition integration — a project lead, group marketing director, or GM — with the frame order as one item on a longer checklist that also covers signage, staffing, and inventory systems. It rarely needs its own dedicated owner separate from that broader rollout plan.
Once branding is locked, the builder gives you an exact price and live preview the same day, so the frame line item on that checklist can move fast even when everything else in the rollout is still in motion.
What if the rollout involves multiple new rooftops at once?
Stagger the frame orders by each store's confirmed opening or transition date rather than batching them into one order for a single "go live" date, since multi-store acquisitions rarely close and open on exactly the same day across every rooftop. Each store's order should be driven by its own timeline.
If the design is standardized across the new rooftops — a group-wide template with only the store name and contact details changing — you can prepare that template once and reuse it per store, which saves design time even though each store's order and delivery date stay separate.
Who typically pays for the first order at a new rooftop?
This depends on your deal structure and internal accounting — sometimes it's part of a broader opening or transition budget set by the acquiring group, sometimes it's the new store's own marketing budget from day one. Confirm which budget it hits before requesting the PO, the same way you would for a routine reorder at an existing store.
See our guide on getting a plate frame order through dealership purchasing and PO approval for how that budget-code question typically gets resolved.
Whichever budget it lands on, get the code confirmed before submitting the PO request rather than after — a new-store purchase without an established budget history is exactly the kind of request that gets bounced back for a missing code, and a rollout timeline has less slack to absorb that delay than a routine reorder does.