Ink Vehicles: To be Successful with Vehicle Wraps, Think Beyond the Graphic

Time was, “vehicle graphics” referred to a company’s name spelled out in adhesive letters bought at a hardware store. For non-commercial vehicles, graphics tended to be simple things like racing stripes, flames, or—for those in the 1970s who took Sammy Johns’ hit “Chevy Van” to heart—elaborate, custom-painted van murals.

Today’s highways and byways offer ample proof that vehicle graphics are big business. They come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations, commercial and “consumer.” Vehicle wraps are even used to change a car’s color, and include other decorative effects such as smoked taillights, tinted headlights, and blacking out chrome. Some are for practical purposes, such as Clearbra, a line of transparent plastic films that protect the paint from road debris and other damage.

Given our culture’s love affair with cars, vehicle graphics can be a sexy and exciting market to be in.

While vehicle graphics can involve applying “holographic multicolor chrome wraps” to Lamborghinis (see “Shake It Up: Vehicle Graphics Hit the Accelerator,” MyPrintResource, Nov. 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/1yRA5u9), they’re actually used more often for prosaic purposes, such as commercial graphics for vans and trucks.

“Vehicle” graphics also aren’t limited to conveyances with four wheels; buses, aircraft, and boats are also potential market niches to exploit. Regardless of what it is you are physically wrapping, many of the same challenges and concerns apply. Some are practical and technological, but some are strategic. That is, are you selling a print or are you involved in the customer’s brand management?

Vehicle Graphics Still Accelerating

“There is no slowing down in sight,” said David Conrad, director of marketing, Mutoh America, Inc. “The market for vehicle graphics will continue to grow for the near and foreseeable future. It’s an exciting application that continues to attract new opportunities for small print shops, window tinters, car dealerships, and others looking to grow their business.”

Conrad said that the bulk of the growth is in fleet graphics—large jobs mainly in business-to-business and corporate sales. “Wraps and decal production provide smaller shops and newbies the ability to get great exposure for their business and grow with shorter-run jobs for custom applications in both the B2B and B2C spaces,” he said.

The Vinyl Frontier

Today, wide-format inkjet printers are the technology du jour for producing vehicle graphics. Models from most of the name brands that use (in general) solvent and eco-solvent inks on vinyl substrates are suitable for vehicle graphics. Latex is up-and-coming but, said Conrad, “may limit the breadth of vinyl material you can use due to high operating temperatures used to dry the ink. They also have a higher net ink cost per square foot than solvent/eco-solvent inks.” UV inks can be limited in terms of stretchability, which makes them not entirely suitable for vehicle graphics.

In terms of substrates, 2 or 3 mil vinyls are the usual materials, with 3M, Avery, and Orafol being the name brands. “Be wary of the cheap imports as most of these lack consistency and the quality necessary for not only vehicle wrap projects but other print applications as well,” advised Conrad. “Wraps are one application where you don’t want to skimp on the materials you use.”

When choosing a printer, the usual specs such as speed, features, print and media width, support options, vendor reputation, flexibility, and, above all, reliability, are the usual things to consider. What size is appropriate?

“Most wrap production shops go with a 60-inch-wide printer so that they can produce panels for wraps that will cover most car and truck hood widths,” said Conrad. “Anything smaller than 60 inches wide could cause some jobs to be seamed on the hood or roof of the vehicle—and that is not acceptable.”

It’s All Geek To Me

Today, wide-format inkjet printers are the technology du jour for producing vehicle graphics. Models from most of the name brands that use (in general) solvent inks on vinyl substrates are suitable for vehicle graphics. High resolution is of paramount importance, and these days that’s pretty easy to find. Quality substrates are also imperative. Again, it’s easy to find good materials but, said Kenny Calman, principal of Oakland Park, FL’s, Geek Wraps, “do your homework.”

Calman had a unique trajectory compared to most graphic arts experts. He started in Hollywood as a stuntman, which led to vehicle wrapping for movies and TV shows: changing the color of cars and planes to match what a particular script called for. Some years later, he invented a system for producing customized cellphone skins. A few years later, Calman decided to move in new directions. He had already invested in wide-format printing and imaging equipment, and looked for other things to print. Thus, Geek Wraps (http://geekwraps.com) began producing banners and vehicle wraps. Calman’s frustration with the dearth of good installation tools led him to design his own. Other wrappers liked them, so Calman had a successful tool business going.

He then decided to get out of commercial wrapping and focus his energies on what today is known as Geek Wraps University, a 3M-authorized training facility that offers three-day (or more) programs both for car-wrap newbies and intermediate-level wrappers looking to improve their skills.

“A lot of people who come here have already wrapped cars and have an idea of how to do it,” said Calman. “We teach them how to wrap every type of complex curve there can be, then we teach them how to use every different type of material.” By the end of the third day, “they can wrap basically anything.”

The Devil’s In My Car Detailing

A car can be described as “boxy,” but few cars actually are simple boxes; they have an intricate surface of curves, crevasses, and other topological features that can make vehicle wrapping a challenge. Successful wrapping means paying very close attention to fine details. One of the goals of Geek Wraps University is to disabuse wrappers of bad habits, which often involve taking shortcuts or not paying attention to detail.

“A lot of people don’t use adhesive promoters,” said Calman. “They don’t do a good job of prepping the car. They don’t understand that the prep is really in the crevasses and the cracks. They overlook the edges. As long as it looks good on the surface, they think the wrap looks good. Then the edges give way and that’s when you have a failure.” Edges of a graphic need to be securely adhered even in those unpleasant and hard-to-get-to places like under the car or in the wheel wells. “It’s easy and fun to wrap a car,” said Calman, “but usually people don’t like the cutting, trimming, and detailing. It also adds a lot of labor to a job.”

Essential things to pay attention to are the specific properties of the material you are using, and understanding the effect of a given geography on wraps and wrap materials. Florida, Arizona, and upstate New York all have very different weather conditions and dry heat, humidity, freezing cold, snow will impact how a wrap should be installed and how one might fail. Driving over snow or ice can scratch a wrap that extends to the edges of a car. As a car warms during the day and then cools at night, the wrap material will expand and contract. The weather to which a wrap is exposed will also affect how difficult it is to remove, and whether there’s the potential for removal to damage the paint underneath. If you’re wrapping someone’s Ferrari, you’ll want to be careful about that.

We often speak of vehicle graphics in terms of land vehicles, but Calman—based in Florida—has wrapped his share of boats. And there, you need to pay attention to what kind of water it’s going to be sailed in: fresh water, brackish water, salt water, etc., as they will all have different effects on the vinyl. Barnacles can be a threat, as well. Planes—usually light aircraft unless you’re servicing a major airline—are also a possibility, but aircraft graphics are subject to FAA regulations, as well as drastic temperature and pressure changes.

Any Color You Like

Much of what vehicle graphics installers do is for commercial purposes, but a lot of wrapping is consumer-level. Small detailing, smoked taillights, chrome black-out, and so on.

“[Car owners] want to do their roofs black, that’s really hot,” said Andy Soleimani, president of StickerCity. Based in Sherman Oaks, CA, StickerCity has been specializing in vehicle graphics—high- and low-end, consumer and commercial—since 2000. “We get a lot of cars with a lot of chrome on them from the factory,” he said, “and people want to black out all the chrome parts on the vehicle.” Many of these jobs, like smoking or tinting head- and taillights, are quick and easy, and often low-margin. “They’re smaller projects or add-ons,” said Soleimani.

A bigger and more complicated application is color-change wrapping.

“People who are changing their vehicle to a different color are looking for really well-detailed graphics,” said Calman. “You can get away with a little bit on advertising, but when it comes to color change, you’ve got to do it perfectly.” Especially if you’re wrapping high-end cars. “We’ve got two guys doing their Bugattis twice a year in different colors. They want to see that detail. The wrapper has got to get a lot more money because there’s a lot more labor involved.”

Most advertising graphics don’t have to cover an entire vehicle; often, a graphics installer can achieve better results applying several smaller, isolated graphics rather than one big wrap. With color changes, the wrapper doesn’t have that luxury. You may have to do the door jambs. You may have to go under the hood and if the customer wants it close to the engine, you have to take into account the heat of the engine. If you’re color-changing a hatchback, there are hinges and latches and other details.

The devil is in the details, as they say.

An Ad Agency for Cars

The technical and practical issues involved in car wrapping can seem daunting, but with more than a little attention to detail, those “bad habits” can be overcome. What many vehicle wrappers stress—especially those doing graphics for commercial vehicles—is to, as a business, think of the wrap job less as a product, and more as a service.

“I feel like most people enter this marketplace focused on the product of vehicle graphics so they spend their time figuring out how to produce the products,” said Scott McLean, CEO of Wheat Ridge, CO-based DI Graphics. “My recommendation would be to think in terms of the brand or the image on the vehicle when it’s done.” That is think of it as an ad agency would.

DI Graphics has a somewhat different M.O. than a lot of vehicle graphics providers. The company was founded in 1929 to make hand-painted signs, got into screen printing in the 1940s, and went all-digital in 2005. It started producing vehicle graphics in the same way that a lot of printing companies expand into new areas: a big customer had the need and DI Graphics sought to accommodate them, which led to bigger and better things.

DI Graphics specializes in large corporate fleets. The company began offering vehicle graphics in the 1980s, and in the 1990s started to take on large vehicle rebranding projects. “Our expertise in large-vehicle rebranding carried us through several large M&As in 2000 and 2004,” said McLean, “and in 2006, 2007, we did probably the largest vehicle rebranding project for AT&T where over a two-year period we rebranded 75,000 vehicles across the United States.” DI Graphics has a nationwide supply chain and network of partners who handle a lot of the installation.

One general trend has been a positive boon for companies like DI Graphics. “We live in a world now where brands are tweaked more frequently,” said McLean.

When companies get acquired, merge, change a tagline, change a graphic element or a color, or do a complete rebranding, their vehicle graphics need to change correspondingly. Given that DI Graphics works with some very large fleets, they have come to rely on a database that tracks each vehicle identification number (VIN) and the details (with photos) of which graphics are on it. “That allows brand departments to know what generation of a brand or brand message is on which particular asset, and they can incorporate that into their brand management,” said McLean.

And that’s ultimately what the role of the vehicle wrapper is, in a sense: helping with brand management.

When working with customers, said Calman, “try to be their ad agency.” For vehicle graphics producers, it’s often about more than just printing and installing the graphics, but designing them as well, either in-house or with outside graphic designers. This is why part of Geek Wraps University’s curriculum is communicating with graphic designers, and understanding the differences between the computer screen and the vehicle.

For example there is a tendency to make artwork too busy. “The actual eyeshot time of going down the road—you’ve got eight seconds passing the vehicle and 30 seconds at a traffic light,” said Calman. “People want to put so much information on the side of their vehicles and they don’t realize that people aren’t going to sit there and read all that.” As they say, less is more.

Calman identified another element that vehicle graphics designers should consider: the “kid factor,” or, he said, “making sure your artwork has something that might attract children. They’ll tap their father or mother on the shoulder and say, ‘Look at that car over there!’ Your service may be something [the parent] needs. You need to be their ad agency for that reason.”

Calman is a big proponent of 3D graphics on vehicles, as it makes the graphics pop without cluttering up the artwork.

“By giving them a good piece of artwork with a three-dimensional shape to it, it does stand off all by itself without being too busy,” he said. “It catches the eye—and it has the kid factor.”

Ultimately, it’s about thinking beyond the graphic.

“I think companies are centered on, ‘how do I get that ink on a substrate to get a vehicle graphic?’” said McLean. Instead, he advised, “Think, how does a client view a branded or wrapped vehicle in their fleet? What purpose does it serve them? It forces the [print] business owner to think more broadly than just printing a vehicle graphic.

“You have to think of the total delivery system and the value that brands or advertising images on vehicles really represents to the brandowner.”