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Tricky vehicle wrap increases printer's profile and sports dozens of logos from clients and suppliers.
Most screen printers market their business through direct mail, a Web site, the local yellow pages or other paid advertising. Jason Rubenstein, co-owner of Stix in Van Nuys, Calif., has found a novel method of self-promotion. Rubenstein bought a Hummer that he then decorated with a full vehicle wrap that he and his partner designed themselves.
The Stix Hummer, which also shows off the logos of the screen printer's largest and most loyal customers and suppliers, draws a crowd wherever Rubenstein parks it.
It created quite a stir at the spring MAGIC retail apparel trade show this past February in Las Vegas. Rubenstein drove the huge and now colorful vehicle down the aisles of MAGIC and parked it at the main entrance on the top floor of the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The vehicle wrap design is dominated by the Stix logo and a huge image of a 16-color TAS automatic screen printing press. The rest of the wrap is decorated with the logos of many of the customers and suppliers who have helped Rubenstein build his nine-year-old contract screen printing business. These include American Apparel, Delta Apparel, R-Bag, The Hundreds (a streetwear company) and Brotherhood Industries (which sells clothing lines to the extreme sports and dirt bike markets).
Rubenstein started on the wrap project three months prior to MAGIC, but the complex job was finished just before the big unveiling. "Originally, we let a bunch of people try to do the artwork," he says. "We are T-shirt guys and didn't think we should be designing artwork for a Hummer. But nobody could do it. Finally, it was a week before the show. So Rick Miller, our artist, and I got our regular work done during the day and every evening for about six nights we stayed up until 11 p.m. designing every side of the car."
The biggest challenge was the sheer size of the job, Rubenstein says. "The art is so big, it took forever," he recalls. "I've never seen [digital artwork] files this big. Most computers are not big enough to handle these huge files. You have to save every section piece...