When it comes down to vehicle wraps, there's a big difference between advertising wraps and paint wraps. If you don't know, advertising wraps are exactly what they sound like: wraps put on vehicles to advertise for a company. So, for instance, a restaurant could get its catering van wrapped with the restaurant's logo or pictures of their food. Paint wraps, one the other hand, are specialty wraps for people's personal—often luxury—vehicles. 

So why should this make a difference at all? The difference is, because the intentions are different for the two wraps, you're going to get different results.

Both kinds of wraps can look great, you should just know which one you're looking for when talking to wrap installers.

Although the overall quality and methodology is essentially the same, we will use different materials and tactics for the two types of wraps, producing different results.

Paint wraps are all about the details and style of your car. Cut vinyl pieces are used instead of digital prints, which means that there are more panels to work with. Because paint wraps are entirely meant to augment the look of your vehicle, installers will take more pains to entirely hide your original paint job than they would for an advertising wrap. This means that installers will have to disassemble parts of the vehicle to fit and tuck the wrap vinyl into seams and corners that could possibly show the paint. Corner lights, tail lights, headlights, door handles, trim, and wheel wells will probably need to be taken apart to allow a seamless installation. For more unique or expensive cars, this may mean hiring a technician to take apart and put together the vehicle. We don't have to tell you, that using mechanics for anything to do with your car isn't cheap! For example, we wrapped a Bentley in matte black vinyl and it had to be disassembled by Maserati, Bentley, and Rolls Royce of Nashville. Painstaking measures are taken to ensure that a paint wrap looks like it is a built-in part of your car. 

Matte black Bentley after a full coverage paint wrap.

Advertising wraps, on the other hand, are all about efficiency and getting a great return on your investment. Your car is being turned into a mobile billboard so installers want to create something eye-catching while staying cost-effective and not putting too much of a dent in your marketing budget. Because advertising wraps usually utilize your logo and other graphic elements, the design is usually printed on one giant piece. This means there's not a lot of extra material leftover to tuck into the seams. For advertising wraps, installers are also less likely to take apart the more complex areas of your vehicle, like lights and handles, to tuck vinyl completely behind the hardware.

This DOES NOT mean that wrap installers won't do a great job trying to completely cover your paint job and make your wrap look seamless. It just means that they are trying to save you money on your marketing investment by not charging you for more labor and time than you need to really make an effective advertisement for your company. We wrapped a bright yellow Fiat, for example, for a child care facility in Middle, TN. They wanted to go from bright lemon yellow to a bright mint green color for the car. Yellow is a difficult color to cover because it's so bright, especially if you're not taking apart the complex hardware, which we didn't. If you get really close to the lights, you can see a miniscule line of yellow ringing them. Is this a bad thing? Not for a traditional advertising wrap!

That's one good lookin' car right there.

The point of this wrap for The Academy was to attract attention and advertise their school while the employees drove around. This wrap will definitely attract attention, and it was installed with quality materials so it should last them for years. By carefully covering the vehicle without removing many of the parts, we were able to charge them less and finish the wrap in about half the time it would have taken if we had disassembled the parts. Justin Pate, one of the world's most renowned wrap installers and instructors teaches courses on speed wrapping techniques, and he himself places, cuts, and squeegees advertising wraps on cars without removing any hardware, leaving a tiny bit of space around the vehicle's details. This method allows installers to cut the time it would take to wrap something in half and can mean that wrapping an advertisement on a huge van like a Nissan NV can cost the same as doing a paint wrap on a small sedan.

If you would like an advertising wrap wrapped like a paint wrap, installers can definitely do that. Just think about what is most important to you when you talk to your wrap installer about getting a wrap.

Paint Wraps

–sleek and seamless

–best for personal, designer vehicles

–usually one solid color or a solid color with cut vinyl elements in another color

–generally takes around 3 days to wrap

–uses cut vinyl panels, which allows for more detailed coverage

Advertising Wraps

–bright and vibrant

–best for company vehicles or personal-use vehicles owned by your company

–virtually limitless options for colors and designs

–generally takes around 1 1/2 days to wrap

–uses very few digitally printed sheets to wrap the entire vehicle

Any other questions? Leave a comment below or contact us to learn more about your options for vehicle wraps!