In our effort to provide the best service and education to our customers, we will be including a wrap care kit to every customer with the purchase of a vehicle wrap free of charge.

The kit includes:

1 Microfiber applicator

1 Microfiber wash mitt

1 Microfiber cloth

8 oz Wrap wash

4 oz Wrap polish

One of our representatives will make it top priority to show you how to care for your wrap using the provided kit.

Give ProWraps a call today at 877-722-WRAP to get your project started and to receive your free wrap kit.

*limit one kit per customer

At it’s core, a vehicle wrap is a dynamic outdoor advertising medium that has a very limited time frame to catch your customer’s eye, and convey your message. With digital printers becoming more and more affordable, the skills used to create an expert design, are becoming second to the ability to print anything and stick it to your vehicle.

Below are 10 tips to help you make sure you get the most of your vehicle wrap’s design:

1. Choose a company with a graphic design background.

This is quite possibly the most obvious and cruicial tip of them all. Vehicle wraps are a graphic medium. As mentioned above, anyone can buy a printer & laminator. A background in graphic design is a must to know how to convey your businesses message and create an interest in your product or service. Don’t be afraid to ask for the design qualifications of the firm.

2. Synchronize your wrap.

Your vehicle wrap is an extension of your company’s brand. It is a rolling business card of sorts. Make sure to synchronize your vehicle wrap design with your existing marketing materials. Your designer’s first job should be to gather your current branding and marketing materials to create a design that is an extension of your brand. It is extremely important that the first step of your wrap design is the compilation of your logo, any ads you are currently running, your yellow page listing, your sales flyers, etc. to create a final product that gains brand awareness for your company. Anything less is hurting your company, not helping it.

3. Don’t oversell!

Nothing is harder to read than a vehicle wrap jammed to the gills with information and/or products. Remember you have a very limited time frame to catch your potential customer’s eye. Pick your best selling points or products, and make sure they are utilized in your wrap design.

4. K.I.S.S.

Another well known commonly used term. Keep It Simple Stupid. As mentioned in #2, the same applies for the design itself. You may have your message nailed down and well organized, but if you clutter the design aspect of the wrap, you are falling in the same trap. Our rule of thumb, is no more than one high res image for each side of the vehicle, mixed with a couple of vector or raster design elements that compliment your current marketing materials. Anything else will leave the viewer scrambling to focus on your message that is crowded out by confusing design.

5. Location, location, location.

Ah the old real estate term. Well guess what. It applies just as much in the world of vehicle wraps. A good artist must know how and where to place each individual message or element on your vehicle to make it as effective as possible. Every vehicle has a different shape, and can be potentially compounded by the amount or size of graphic coverage that you chose. Make sure your designer understands how to utilize this space to get your message across. For example, you wouldn’t want your text to be stretched across a flared fender rendering your phone number or web address useless by making it look like a crooked line. The same applies to your logo and other elements. Vehicle wrap templates are 2 dimensional, not 3 dimensional. An experienced designer will be familiar with your vehicle and understand these limitations of templates. Just because it looks good on paper, doesn’t necessarily mean it will on the vehicle.

6. Fills are for soft drinks, not wraps.

With the popularity of vehicle wraps growing daily, and the people with a lack of a design background offering them to their customers, an unfortunate product has come to be a mainstay of vehicle wrap design. This product is called a “fills” collection. These are usually purchased on disks from companies that specialize in these types of designs and they are typically dropped into your wrap as a way to “fill” the background. Text is usually hovered over the fill with some sort of stroke, or drop shadow that is usually heavy and bold to float it above the fill. This is a dead giveaway that you are dealing with a designer that doesn’t have a graphic design background and may or may not know how to design your wrap properly.

7. Utilize the back of your vehicle.

Sometimes you can’t get around it. You have a complex message to convey and you need to list out some bullet points, multiple service lists, or just a large amount of text. If this is the case, just remember that the back of your vehicle is where your impression time will be increased. This is for obvious reasons. The back of your vehicle is where traffic behind will spend longer amounts of time than drivers passing by the sides. Use the sides of the vehicle to brand your company’s logo, phone number, web address and/or imagery. Use the back of the vehicle to spell out your complex messaging to the people that will have the time to absorb it.

8. High resolution is your friend, and so are vector illustrations.

You may or may not have experience with graphic design and resolution conversions of images or design elements. It is very important that you and your designer understand the difference between vector and raster based images, and how they are scaled to fit your design. Industry standard for vehicle wrap prints is 72 dpi printed at 720×720 resolution. Technical jargon isn’t it? Well, lets break it down. What you are looking at right now is 72 dpi. It’s sometimes called screen resolution. Offset printing is typically done at 150 dpi to 300 dpi. This is not necessary for vehicle wraps and digital printing. What this means in relation to the resolution of your stock photography is simply a bit of mathematics. While 72 dpi resolution is a suitable print resolution, you DO NOT want to go below as you will get grainy pixelated images on your wrap. So when your designer creates your wrap, you want to provide them with high resolution quality images. The mathematics involved are very simple and give you an idea of how large of an image you can yield from your stock photography. The equation goes something like this:

final size allowed (at 72 dpi) = current resolution / 72 * stock size

In simple terms, if you have an image that is 6″x6″ @ 144 dpi, you will be able to increase that image up to 12″x12″ at 72 dpi. That will be the largest size you can use to design your wrap.

This is for raster based images and designs ONLY. If your logo, design element, text, etc. is vector based, you will have no problems scaling them as large or as small as needed without any quality loss.

Long story short, make sure that your designer is not only aware of these terms, processes, and file types, but that you provide them with imagery and files that will meet these criteria.

9. Overlays, contours, and changing content.

Let’s face it, a wrap should last NO LESS than 3 years. Typically up to 5. If you own a fleet of vehicles, or you have vehicles that have specific text, or design elements, ask your designer about overlays for the changing text or elements. Overlays are typically text such as vehicle numbers, phone numbers, or other elements that are created from high performance cut vinyl and applyed over the wrap after it is installed. This provides several benefits to the finished product and you as the customer.

• Allows text to be placed in a perfectly straight line over contoured surfaces after the wrap is installed
• Allows one design to be created with different numbers, or elements for different vehicles saving the customer time and money
• Allows certain elements of the design to be changed on the vehicles as time goes by to suite businesses that may change text, numbers, etc on a regular or scheduled interval

Overlays are also useful to add reflective logos, text or elements to your wraps. For example, ProWraps is responsible for the installation of all the wraps for the largest plumbing franchise in the United States. After the wrap is installed, we overlay the main logo text with a reflective cut vinyl. This allows the wrap to be printed on standard 3M materials, while giving the customers a highly visible look when lights are shined on the vehicle/s at night.

10. Paying for design.

Design rates typically range from $65 to $75 an hour. This is standard for any design firm and again, is a reason why you should only deal with a wrap firm that has a design background. If you are paying for it, you should get what you pay for. Some companies will throw in design, some will charge a flat rate, and some will bill hourly.

I always recommend that if paying for design, never agree to pay for anything other than hourly services. It is customary in this scenario for the designer to spec out a time frame estimate based on the vehicle and the customers needs. For a passenger vehicle, cargo van, or typical vehicle, this should be no more than 4-5 hours of time. Unless custom elements, illustration, or logo design are necessary, there is no reason a wrap should take longer to design.

If your firm requires a design charge, and you have agreed to the hourly model as I mentioned above, make sure that your wrap company bills you as an allowance for the design. Some firms may estimate you the 4-5 hours, when it may only take 2-3 hours time, and the balance of the monies are kept in the firm’s pocket. This is unethical and unnecessary. Trained graphic designers are accustomed to keeping accurate billing time tables for each project they work on. Any unused design time should be applied back to the final balance of the wrap.

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This is part one of a two part article. I have another 10 tips that I will compile for release in the near future.

I know that entering the world of vehicle wraps can be an exciting and at the same time an intimidating process for some. The rewards that will be bestowed on your company will be substantial and enjoyable. I hope that I have provided you with some good information to get you started with the first stage of your wrap purchase.

If you have any questions that I can answer, please dont hesitate to give me a call at 877-722-WRAP. I have a background in graphic design, and absolutely love this field and the people that I can help benefit from it.

Chris Burgess, Partner

Many people have experienced the power of outdoor mobile advertising due to the lower costs that the new digital printing industry has offered. This has caused a boom in the amount of wraps on the road as well as the amount of businesses that are offering this service to their customers.

The typical school of thought is that a vehicle wrap is something that any sign shop can offer their clients. Which in theory is true. The problem is that these “sign shops” are just that, “sign shops”. They tend to try to offer as many services to their customers as they can, compromising quality and reliabilty of their products.

Vehicle wraps are very complex, dynamic products that require a very high level of knowledge, support and training to be done properly. It’s one thing to print a banner, create a business card, or even put some cut vinyl lettering on your car. It’s quite a different process to effectively design, print, laminate, and install a full vehicle wrap without compromising the quality, and/or damaging the vehicle. These inexperienced “sign shops” lack the proper training and business model to keep from putting cut lines in the vehicles paint, or even worse charging for a product that is improperly installed leading to an early failure or a chopped up mess of an install.

As a vehicle wrap shop, ProWraps offers one service and one service only. Vehicle wraps. We don’t try to be all things to all people. We don’t make business cards. We don’t make signs.

We eat, sleep and breath the art of vehicle wraps. From the graphic design of your message, to the quality of the print, to the proper installation of your finished wrap. Our facility is purpose built to do nothing but provide quality vehicle wraps at the best price.

As a wrap shop only, we work very close with the manufacturers and reps of 3M, Arlon & Oracal on a daily basis. This allows us to make sure that your wrap will last years instead of months, and that your vehicle will not be damaged during the installation process.

Countless times we have had customers come to us with a vehicle wrap that was installed locally by a “sign shop” to see if the wrap was installed correctly or if it has failed. More often than not, we find that these wraps were poorly installed and typically printed on substandard printers causing muddy prints or off color images.

It is important for a customer purchasing a item that can cause potential damage to your vehicle if installed poorly, that you do your homework to make sure the shop has the credentials and the experience to work on your vehicle. We call it the “multi-function fax machine syndrome”. Would you like to go to someone that provides 5 services poorly, or to someone that specializes in one thing only, vehicle wraps.

Below are some examples of a wrap that came to us recently from a local sign shop. This wrap had been installed for less than a month and not only was it installed incorrectly, it had suffered failures on almost every panel of the vehicle. The print was muddy, had severe banding and was printed on outdated media. To add insult to injury, the untrained installers left cut lines in the vehicles paint job.

^^Examples of bad wrap from local sign shop^^

Don’t be a victim of a bad wrap. Make sure and go to the experts. ProWraps is THE ONLY dedicated vehicle wrap company in all of Northern California.  Give us a call at 877-722-WRAP to get your project done correctly. We are Fellers Certified & members of the PDAA (Professional Decal Applicators Association). Even more importantly, this is all that we do.

Adding a vehicle wrap to your advertising campaign can be a costly affair for some small, and even some large businesses. There is definitely a reason why every car on the road isn’t sporting a vehicle wrap. This is a double edge sword in the world of vehicle wraps.

The relatively lack of wraps on business vehicles allows your wrap to stand out in a crowd with ease. This is due to the fact that the cost of a vehicle wrap can eclipse the budget of many businesses looking to get into the wrap market. Even though the benefits of wrapping a vehicle outweigh almost any other form of advertising, it can be a daunting task when it comes to writing the check.

There are several ways to help ease the cost of wrapping your vehicle. Some are pretty obvious, others are something that you may not have thought about.

The most obvious way to save money on a vehicle wrap is to partially wrap a vehicle, or use a combination of cut vinyl and contour cut decals. Although not as effective as a full wrap, if done correctly, the amount of advertising impressions can be significant, and the savings will be as well. Make sure to focus on a part of the vehicle that will be seen by other drivers for long periods of time such as the rear of the vehicle and the driver and passenger sides. The goal is to capture as much of an audience as you can as fast as you can.

The partial wrap, is another great way to cut the cost of a vehicle wrap. This consists of the same process as a full wrap, yet again, like the cut vinyl and contour cut, it only covers the vehicle partially. The advantage to this over cut vinyl, is that you still are using a digital print/lamination combination to get the full color results. The cost savings of a partial wrap can vary significantly depending on the amount of vehicle coverage, as well as vehicle placement. Again, like mentioned above, make sure to focus on an area of the vehicle that will be viewed often, and for a greater period of time.

The third major way to save money when wrapping a vehicle is one that many people don’t realize is an option. Say for example you own a small retail store and you would like to wrap your commuter vehicle for impressions on the road, as well as a mobile sign to park outside your business. You don’t want to compromise on the quality of the wrap and you would like to have the vehicle mostly or completely covered. The problem is 3-5 thousand dollars may be a bit too much for your budget.