Commercial Countertop Appliance Wraps for Numilk
We were contacted by Numilk to explore the possibility of creating branding-focused graphic vinyl wraps for their commercial drink mixing machines. Being an already-established brand with machines in over 150 commercial locations nation-wide (as of the writing of this post), we faced the necessity of creating 2D vinyl graphics that were accurate to the 3D shape of the machine and could be easily applied by a lay person without extensive experience/knowledge of wrap vinyl application or meticulous trimming. In essence, we needed to create a set of decals to cover as much of the appliance as possible, while being super-easy to install.
These machines are manufactured by Hamilton Beach, a very large company in the kitchen appliance industry, so understandably getting a 3D CAD file didn’t have a great chance of happening - we had to get creative. Our solution came from a material hanging around just about every sign shop - transfer tape. We applied the transfer tape to the machine - as if we were wrapping the unit in the tape - trimmed it to the shape of the machine, then peeled it off. That left us with the exact shape of each decal piece we’d want in the end.
To get those shapes from table to computer screen, it would have been best to use something like a large-format scanner. We didn’t have access to one, so we made do with a printed grid for scaling and a camera. This introduced some lens warping that we did our best to account for, and proceeded to trace the shapes in Adobe Illustrator to create our first rough draft of the cut shapes.
We proceeded to cut, apply, measure, adjust, re-cut, etc. through a few drafts until we landed on a template that when cut, resulted in decals that perfectly fit the body of the machine. Below are a few pictures showing the steps in that whole process. To give a sense of scale, placement, etc. we did a quick draft of a potential wrap design using elements from Numilk’s website.
Numilk Commercial Drink-Mixing Machine
Design Template & Tutorial
To-scale, shape-accurate template of the Numilk Commercial Machine
Creating the template for our production machine to cut wouldn’t be much use without being able to actually create designs for the appliances. For that, we fell back on our experience creating accurate, to-scale templates for commercial refrigerators in Adobe Illustrator. We created a PDF template file that is pre-configured with proper layering, safe areas, and the cut-lines necessary for production pre-baked in, so any designer can work in the template with the confidence that their design will come out exactly as they envisioned it, and when they send it to us, all we have to do is hit print.
We also filmed a first-person POV tutorial video showing in real-time how exactly to apply one of these decal sets so that anyone, no matter level of experience, can achieve a clean and professional installation. This allows our customers to internalize the wrapping process or even offer their customers to apply the decals themselves - avoiding costly double-shipping of the appliances from Numilk, to us, then to the customer.
Are you a company with commercial appliances you’d like to get custom graphics for? Are you a branding company looking to offer something similar to a client?
