Wrapping the NaanStop Food Truck

This is part of an ongoing series about the start up of a food truck called NaanStop. You can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, or email me at [email protected] with any feedback. Check back here for weekly updates!

 

The wrap is the single biggest purchase we have made to this point – quotes ranged from $2500 to $5000. It was the last major item on our checklist and needed to be completed in 5 days to meet our target launch. But, we didn’t want to compromise the quality on what would be the face of our brand.

 

The wrap is basically a giant decal that is stuck onto the truck. So why is there such a huge difference in prices? As I looked around, I began to notice that the best companies are the ones that take the time to care about the details. Food trucks have a lot of edges, rivets, and oddly shaped parts. I didn’t realize until I watched the installation of our wrap just how much time goes into ensuring that there are no air bubbles around each rivet for example.

 

I had heard some horror stories with trucks getting wraps with mismatched colors, stripes that didn’t line up, and peeling and fading issues, so I really put a lot of time into vetting my wrap company. You can have a great design, but if the shop doesn’t execute it, it’s not going to look very good. So, I called over a dozen places and asked for price quotes and examples of their work. Our wrap design has some intricate details like watermarked henna tattoo designs throughout the truck and I needed to know that the shop we chose would be detail oriented enough to get it done right. I of course wanted to save money where I could, but was unsure the shops with cheaper quotes would take the time to execute the detail of our design.

 

Again on the recommendation of our friends Mike and Tina at the Hungry Nomad Truck (@nomadtruck), we looked into LA Car Wrap. Our point of contact there, Mayling, was quick to email examples of their work and we were really impressed by the quality from the husband and wife team behind this shop. Their installation quality we thought was comparable to the highest priced shops. But, at around $3500 using the highest quality material, they were priced at a great value. Later, I found out that they did the wraps for some of the cars in Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race.” Had I known that ahead of time it would have made my decision to go with them even easier.

 

Mayling and Jeffery at LA Car Wrap were also very flexible with both our schedule and our demands, working late nights and early mornings to get our wrap done on schedule. We had some very specific requests. For example, we wanted our menu board to be magnetic and also a dry erase board. The trucks are made of aluminum, which is not magnetic, so we needed to mount a piece of sheet metal onto the truck and wrap it with a special type of laminate that would let us write on it with dry erase markers. Without flinching, Mayling said that they had never done anything like that before, but that they would figure it out and get it done. They also called later on their own to say that they didn’t like the way the color had turned out in one spot and wanted to schedule a time to fix it– that was some attention to detail that we really appreciated.

 

Once it was all done, we toasted to our newly wrapped truck with a shot of tequila chased with my favorite Indian soda, Limca. Below are pictures of some action shots and the completed wrap. Let us know what you think!