Photograph by Brinson + Banks
If you’ve ever looked at a flickering neon sign and thought, I bet I could make one of those, be advised: You almost certainly could not. At once a science and an art, neon demands an artisan’s understanding of glass and a chemist’s mastery of the noble gases. The process is rarely executed by a single person but rather completed in steps by a series of trained experts.
Inside The Neon Company studio on DeKalb Avenue, a guild of craftspeople spends their days hand-fabricating neon signs in much the same way their progenitors did a century ago. The company, which launched in 1983, is one of the last remaining neon signage outfits in the country, having survived the many booms and busts of the industry.
As demand for neon has shrunk, increasingly replaced by cheaper new technology, The Neon Company has stayed alive through a mix of commercial signage, private custom orders, and work for film and television. Neon isn’t exactly a cash geyser, notes Gregg Brenner, who started the company in his 20s. But like pretty much everyone who finds their way into it, he just loves the oddball industry. “One of the joys of what we do is how many people from different walks of life get into neon,” he says. “You never know who’s going to walk through the door.”
Photograph by Brinson + Banks
Inside the shop, production manager Craig Weido points to a metal pipe anchored to the floor, a blue flame searing across its bladelike top. “Just watch out for the torch,” he says mildly. Wearing a pair of blue-tinted glasses, a small pipe attached to a rubber hose slung around his neck, Weido looks like a futuristic mad scientist, right at home amid the organized chaos of the shop’s interior.
Wielding a long, narrow glass tube, he demonstrates the art of glass-bending—don’t call it glass-blowing—in which the tubes are heated and then shaped into letters or designs that form the neon sign. An expert glass bender is worth their weight in gold: It takes many thousands of hours to master the skill. Today, Weido’s heating a foot-high letter T for a Texas Roadhouse sign.
Once the glass tubes are shaped, they are “bombarded” with gas to create the vivid colors synonymous with the medium. The signs are filled either with neon or argon, depending on the intended color, while coatings on the tube effect a wider range of hues, from candy pink to fluorescent yellow and emerald green. Argon reacts only with the addition of mercury: For this, a tiny bead of the silvery substance is carefully hand-maneuvered through the length of the tube to coat the interior.
Photograph by Brinson + Banks
Photograph by Brinson + Banks
To pump neon into the letter T he’s just made, Weido heads over to the manifold, a chemistry geek’s dream of pressure valves, labyrinthine tubes, and a medieval-looking lever dangling from the ceiling, which allows him to control the flow of electricity into the glass. “There are two types of neon nerds,” explains Vyvyan Hughes, The Neon Company’s art department project manager. “The type A people who like all the newest tech, and those who are more old-school, like us, who use refurbished stuff.”
“We’re a little bit ‘fly by the seat of our pants,’” adds Weido with a smile.
After heating the tube with electricity to about 450 degrees Fahrenheit and blasting it free of impurities, Weido switches on the gas, unleashing a stream of neon that gradually fills the glass. The piece looks clear when it’s full, but as soon as the electrodes on either end are attached to a transformer, the neon gas reacts instantly to the electrical current, illuminating the tube in a hypnotizing red. Once installed, the gas trapped inside is stable: Neon signs can last for decades. The Neon Company has on the wall a long blue tube that originally illuminated the ceiling of Fox Theatre, still glowing brightly after 80 years.
As Weido is finishing, local interior designer Clarke Coggins drops by with a metal sign he wants filled in with neon letters for a new restaurant opening next weekend. “I love the nostalgia factor of neon,” says Coggins. “Taking this old art form and mixing it with new—you can’t replace that.” But it’s getting harder to find suppliers for projects outside of Atlanta, he notes: “People will tell me, ‘Neon’s a dying art. We got rid of all that stuff years ago.’”
Over the past three decades, LED lights—bright, cheap, and efficient—have steadily been replacing older types of bulbs. They’ve devoured what was once the cornerstone of the neon industry, backlighting covered signs, like the glowing red-and-blue Chevron you might see above a gas station.
“That’s how you learn neon, making ugly lightbulbs behind plexiglass,” says Weido. “Now you don’t have a body of work to learn on while getting paid, so that’s been a problem with getting new folks into the industry.” When he first entered the business decades ago, Atlanta was full of neon shops. “Now there’s probably only 10 or 12 people in Georgia who can do this stuff.”
As their competitors closed, The Neon Company survived by absorbing Atlanta’s remaining demand—more or less all of it. Weido and Hughes reckon their team has put hands on nearly every neon sign in Atlanta at one point or another, whether it’s endless repairs to the vintage Coca-Cola sign downtown or constructing the “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal” holiday sign at Ponce City Market (covered by a metal cage to prevent drunk selfie takers from cracking the glass tubes).
Film and television work has also been a local lifeline for the industry: The Neon Company has produced neon projects for everything from ABC’s Will Trent to Netflix’s Stranger Things. For Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the team constructed signage for an elaborate, futuristic strip club, complete with several leg-kicking ladies. (In the real world, the company has lately tried to shy away from the netherworld of strip club neon.) “Film designers love working with neon,” says Hughes. “There’s just nothing like it.”
Photograph by Brinson + Banks
Neon has long captivated visual artists, too. The Neon Company fabricated letters for Radcliffe Bailey, who was working them into pieces made of billowy burlap before his death in 2023. From a rack of completed work, Hughes picks out a practice number 3 she made for Bailey, for a piece he never got the chance to finish. “Clear blue, uncoated emerald green, and uncoated ruby—those were his favorite neon colors,” says Hughes fondly.
There’s enough demand to keep the eight-member team busy every day, but Brenner, the owner, says he’s not sure how long it will last. “I don’t want to run a business into my 80s, and I’m not sure anyone wants to take this over for me,” he muses. Film and television work has slowed considerably amid a wider industry downturn, and more and more businesses are eschewing the costs and headaches of repairing neon for the
ease of LEDs.
But Brenner—like everyone who falls in love with the stuff—believes neon will always survive. Something about its mesmerizing glow, at once futuristic and timeless, keeps people coming back to its strange alchemy. “You can hear the word neon in a bunch of songs, including some by Bob Dylan,” Brenner says. “You’re not ever going to hear that about LED lights.”
This article appears in our March 2025 issue.
