Crux Rebrands 100-Vehicle Fleet Graphics
“If you want a talented, reliable, and friendly crew I would highly recommend Crux.”
If you're from the Cincinnati area, you've probably heard that Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center announced a rebrand in March 2016. They asked Crux to handle the huge job of producing and installing graphics for their 100-vehicle fleet. We worked with Brook Totton and the marketing team from Cincinnati Children's to get the job done correctly and efficiently.
Step 1: Choosing Crux RoadBoardz
Cincinnati Children's hasn't always used Crux for their fleet graphics needs. Brook had a bad experience with an unreliable installation crew, so she was looking for a new company to work with. Understandably, she was a little hesitant. She says, "With the number of vehicles needed to be done I knew there would be room for error and wondered how reliable the crew would be." We invited Brook and her team to our facility to take a tour and get a sense of what we're capable of producing. Meeting our design team and learning the systems we have in place helped us win the trust and confidence to win the work.
Step 2: Designing the fleet graphics
Cincinnati Children's fleet has everything from pick up trucks, box trucks, 12-passenger vans, sprinter vans, SUVs, shuttle buses, and two types of ambulances. For each type of vehicle, our design team needed to create a template and size the graphics to fit the vehicle proportionately. This was a big step to ensure consistency in the design across the fleet. We created approximately 20 different templates to ensure the design looked sharp and uniform across the fleet. We also met with Cincinnati Children's a few more times to test things like material quality and color consistency. We printed samples to make sure they would be happy with the results before they sank a lot of money into new fleet graphics.
This stood out to Brook. "The crew is an amazing, talented group of people. I spent a lot of time with a variety of workers from administration, design, and install and everyone was very friendly and responsive to my needs," she commented. We pride ourselves on this level of communication and responsivness to our customers.
Step 3: Printing and packaging
With an order this large, it would have been easy to make a number of small mistakes. Our design and production teams work closely together to check and double check the correct graphics were printed, weeded, laminated, and masked. This took an enormous amount of organizational work. Cincinnati Children's had to coordinate what vehicles could be out of commission for a few hours for the installation to take place. We neeeded to know which vehciles were available on which day to make sure the correct graphics were in our van for our installation crew.
This also meant we had to plan ahead what design (remember those 20 templates from Step 2?) needed to be printed with enough lead time for weeding, masking, and laminating. For smaller designs like the cab door on a truck, printing doesn't take a long time. But for full wraps like shuttle buses or ambulances, printing alone can take four hours per vehicle.
The final step of production was to organize the graphics into a packet for each vehicle (organized by licence plate) so they were ready to go for our installation team.
Step 4: Installing the graphics
“They are a well-oiled-machine crew.”
While we usually prefer to install graphics in our installation bay, it wasn't possible to bring the entire fleet to our facility. Our installation crew completed the work onsite, first removing the previous logo and design, and then installing the new fleet graphics.
How did our team compare to Children's previous experience? "The crew was already onsite working by the time I would arrive every morning and the installation ran very smoothly. They are a well-oiled-machine crew," she says.