How Long Does it Take to Vinyl Wrap a Vehicle?

It’s a necessary evil of living in this age of fast technology and instant communication, when people decide they want something, they want it now. After deciding to expand your branding with a vehicle wrap, you might be feeling the same way. Your white delivery van was once just a regular van, but now it seems like a wasted marketing opportunity! Okay, calm down and take a deep breath, because your wrap will be on the road, spreading visibility before you know it. How long does it take to wrap a vehicle? The answer, of course, depends on a few different variables, but we’ll try and break it down for you:

Design:

At Sunrise, every design starts with a consultation. Our designers work one on one with you to discuss your needs and ideas, and he or she will send you proofs and updates as the design progresses. It’s a good idea to allow seven to ten days from your initial consultation to completion. It always helps the design process if you have a clear idea of what you want your finished vehicle wrap to look like. The more you know about what you want, the more easily we can create it for you. We’re firm believers in collaboration, so before you know it, you’ll have a quality vehicle wrap design to be excited about!

If you’re sending an existing design to us, we’ll check it over against a template of the vehicle to make sure that everything is going to line up as it should. Not all graphic designers are familiar with the specific quirks of vehicle wrap design, and by giving everything a quick once over we can look for any problem areas like faces that are covering door handles or text that might be obscured by a curve in the vehicle’s body. This way we can let you and your designer know about any issues prior to the install. Assuming everything looks good, we’ll put you into our production queue as soon as we can.

Print/ Laminating/ Trimming:

Between final design approval and installation, you should allow about a week for us to print, laminate, and trim your wrap. You may be wondering, how on earth it could possible take a week when we’re using such big, high tech printers? Well, before we begin printing the final graphics onto the vinyl wrap material, we do a spend a bit of time making sure that the colors are just right. We pride ourselves on making sure that our wraps and print materials match the colors in your existing corporate branding perfectly. In addition to color matching, we make sure to spend time prepping the file in order to minimize the placement of seams.

Once when we print your graphics we like to allow 24 hours between printing and laminating in order for a process called “out-gassing” to occur. Letting the ink fully dry prevents gasses from being trapped under the laminate, thus avoiding bubbles in your nice, smooth wrap. After the ink is dry, we run everything through our laminator. Then we trim excess material away from the sides.

Installation:

Phew! Now that that’s all taken care of, we get to the actual installation of the graphics. Depending on the what we’re wrapping, we like to keep the vehicle  for one to two days during the installation process. This gives us time to get everything just right, and having it over night gives us a chance to fix any little problems or air bubbles that may not have been immediately apparent during the installation. Some jobs like partial wraps, window decals, or vehicle lettering, can be done in a day or even an afternoon. If we’re installing fleet graphics or wrapping a particularly large or curvy vehicle we may take a little more time.

So, how long does a vehicle wrap take? From your first design consultation to your first time behind the wheel of your newly wrapped vehicle, it normally ranges between three to four weeks. Want to make the time go faster, just think about all of the mobile marketing you'll soon be accomplishing!