Paint Colour vinyl is it the same as Euro standard colour?

[Robert Lambie]

We have 3 companies that we do work for that need this type of vinyl.
Basically you need it screened/flood coated the colour you want.
Or
You have a company like Cox or europoint get it made especially for you.
Both methods are expensive. The screened/flood coated way is about £400 a roll and its only 13 inch wide. Minimum 50-metre roll.
The problem with this method is it fades and looks dull/crap after about 12 months.
We took the manufacturers route recently of having our own vinyl made up.
This way you must buy about £4000 worth of the vinyl but it comes 1230 wide x 50 metre rolls and isn’t a flood coat so lasts the “full” test of time.
We have had folk come in under us offering cheaper alternatives to our customers but after they see they are being cheated with cheap alternatives they come right back to us.
Large large companies have some stupid staff making stupid decisions but they quickly catch on. Then its night night for the cowboy!
If you intend going in with a company like this I would advise on the vinyl being made for you, rather than screened.

[Alex Wilson]

The RAL reference is mainly used by powder coaters so if you have one close then they should be able to shoe you a colour chart!

[Andy Gorman]

I think John Childs found a good supplier of colour matched vinyl. JOHN…….where are ya?

We used to rotary print vinyl at Fineline and then lacquer it with clear but I don’t know what lifespan it achieved.

[John Childs]

RAL5007?

No problem.

I have it in stock at 1220 wide. I’m down to my last 250 metres though.

You can have as much, or as little, as you want.

Give me a call on 01536 771772 and I’ll post you a sample.

[John Childs]

popcornpro…..

Now that i’ve got a bit more time. 🙂

I’m afraid I might be trying to teaching grandmother to suck eggs, but here goes anyway…..

RAL colours aren’t a “mix”. RAL is another colour standard specification system. Others include Focoltone, Trumatch and Toyo together with the more familiar, to us, Pantone Matching System (PMS).

RAL is in much more general use on the continent, where it is used for all sorts of things, but this side of the channel it is pretty much restricted to powder coating, as Alex pointed out. However, all the car paint manufacturers have it in their ranges and if you go to your local body shop they will be able to show you the colour chips. If you know a tame one, and are really nice to them, they might give you their copy because they are never likely to use it. At any rate that’s how I got mine. 🙂

If you take a look at the current MacTac 9800 Pro fan type swatch book you will see, in the bottom left hand corner of each colour the RAL equivalent printed on many of them. Unfortunately for us there is not a vinyl made to every RAL colour, but this is also true of Pantone, and we have to find ways around it.

As I say, RAL is in common use on the continent and, in the circumstances you describe, your client’s parent company is likely to be in Europe. A German manufacturer of fork lift trucks for example. 🙂

It may be a big company, but no-one in their UK division is going to know the Pantone number of their corporate colour because no-one will tell them. Not even their head office, because they don’t know either. The big marketing agency that designed their corporate image has specified RAL5007 and RAL5007 is all you will get because no-one is going to take the responsibiity of specifying anything else after the effort and expense that went into the original design. Also, they don’t understand why they should have to because RAL is a perfectly valid spec. Also bear in mind that there might not even be a direct equivilent.

If you can’t get a standard material anywhere near the right colour, and in the case of RAL5007 I can guarantee you won’t, because I’ve been fruitlessly keeping my eye open for fourteen years, you are left with the options pointed out by Robert, namely flood coating white vinyl with screen ink, like the truck you saw in the auction, or getting the vinyl made specially.

Even then you are reliant on the ink or vinyl manufacturer making a good match, which despite some pretty sophisticated equipment is still largely a matter of doing it by eye, so make sure that you get a sample approved by your customer before ordering barrowloads of the stuff.

Approval is important because even the same colour will often look different when produced in different materials. I don’t know why this should be but is perhaps due to factors such as density, reflectivity, gloss levels, different types of pigments or any of many other factors. For this reason your RAL5007 vinyl sample will probably not match one of their letterheads. If your client looks through their stationery cupboard I dare bet they they will find about a dozen different shades on different batches of stationery, brochures, leaflets etc etc.

Also look at any sample in different types of light. Incandescent, fluorescent and, of course, daylight.

Sorry, I seem to be in waffle mode, but hope that this helps.

Regards – John

[Paul Goodwin]

John that wasn’t waffle

Thats realy usefull information that a newbie like me would probably never got hold of until it was too late and made myself look like a proper clown infront of a customer.

Thanks for that John

[popcornpro]

Thanks John,

Very useful information and you are right… everything printed is in different colours, brochures, letterheads, signage, lorries… forklifts 😉 !

I can never understand why companies can’t just screw their heads on and decide on these factors before going ahead with different media production.

To be honest my background is more in design for print and web and have only just, in the past 9 months, been integrating signage. And what a headache some issues are.

Even with pantones, yesterday I spent hours tracking down equivalents from original designers of metalic, spot and process equivalents… and no-one had a clue… making every piece of corporate coloured media completely different for my client.

I will be phoning you on Monday regarding your vinyl but the job is only small (3 tailgates and a small sign) so I will only require a small amount of meterage. I didn’t get the spec until late Friday night but have a few questions to ask.

Ideally, would large companies not be better being encouraged to purchase their own stock for vehicle livery. Or better still, the vehicle leasing company. I know this is cutting out the markup aspect of vinyl for the signmaker but from a corporate point of view, where different service providers are used for different jobs around the country at least the colours would be the same! For example, there is no way I am spending 4K on vinyl on the off chance that I might get all the fleet work from the vehicle leasing company AND signage from the end client.

Anyway, I feel like I am rambling now…

Rich

[John Childs]

OK popcorn, I look forward to your call.

Assuming that we are talking about the same end user here….

They started having proper custom colour vinyl on vehicles registered after 1st September 2003 and everything before that was rotary printed. For the reasons stated above there is a difference in the colour and it will look horrible if the two different techniques are next to each other, for instance on adjacent panels on the body stripe.

We still have a small stock of the old printed stuff here which we use for repairs on vehicles where this material was used originally. It looks like you are doing repairs on existing vehicles so the old stuff might be more appropriate for you. Whatever, I can send you a sample of both and it will be obvious to you which one you need.

Finally, on this subject, don’t be dazzled by prospect of getting all this company’s work nationwide. It won’t happen because the folks in your area do not have the authority to make it happen. This company was originally one large organisation but back in 1990 or so it was split up into about eight separate entities with the existing management in each area investing in their own branches which were then grandly called Joint Venture Companies, or JVCs for short, although this has now changed and they style themselves as National Network Companies, or NNCs.

What this boils down to is that, although they are trading under the same umbrella, they are still completely separate companies with separate owners and separate decision making structures and in no way does a decision by one bind the others. If one comes across a really good deal they will bring it to the others attention at one of their meetings, but that is about all they can do and it is up to each NNC to make their own policy.

If I had a penny for every time such a non existent carrot was dangled under my nose I’d be retired by now. 🙂

On more general lines……

I think that your idea of clients keeping their own material in stock is probably the worst one I have heard this week. 🙁

When you try to obtain a new client they will beat you about the ears on price and you need to be super competitive to get the business. Accident repairs are a different matter because although they will spend hours getting a good price on five hundred vehicles they aren’t going to waste more than five nanoseconds on a bit of stripe for a wing following accident damage and therefore you can charge what you like. It gets better, because accident repairs are normally paid for by their insurance company and you can really stick it to those b@st@rds. Where else are they going to get the decals if their customer has specified you as the sole supplier?

There is also the service aspect. An end user will spend a lot of time in choosing an original supplier because, assuming equal quality, a fiver per van saved on a five hundred van fleet is a significant sum. However, once this is done they lose interest and don’t want to be bothered with the day-to-day operation of their fleet and this is where we come in. One of their drivers takes a van in for repair and gives the repairer a copy of the company procedure, on which is our name and phone number. The repairer orders the decals and fits them – problem solved.

The end user gets his decals done with no input from him, no organisation or paperwork to worry about and thinks what jolly fine fellows were are in providing such a magnificent service. Do this for them and they will need a mighty good reason to go elsewhere.

The reason I consider this crucial to my business is that it is far easier to hang on to an existing client than it is to find a new one. Equally important, I have lost count of the number of companies that came to us originally because their previous supplier did not look after them.

I’m waffling again. Have a good weekend.

[popcornpro]

Thanks for the time you spent on replying… I am new to this business and I am sure some of my ideas are just completely cr@p and I probably need slapped about with a wet fish to bring me back to the world of commerce.

Cheers,

Rich

[John Childs]

Not at all popcorn.

We all took time to learn and whilst some things came easily, others took a long time, and yet more were very expensive lessons in how not to do things. The idea of this forum is to help each other and I’m sure that you have areas of expertise in which I am completely clueless and will hopefully benefit from your advice at some time in the future.

Also bear in mind that I don’t know everything, even if I like to think I do, and others may well have different ideas. In fact I can pretty much guarantee it. 🙂 On any subject, get opinions from as many people as you can, then make up your own mind and conduct your own business accordingly. You will still get things wrong occasionally but you will stand a better chance of being right more often.

Unlike working in a large company, running your own business can sometimes be very lonely when you have no-one to talk problems through with and this forum can help a lot when you find something that is worrying you silly has been encountered by someone else in the past, and you find out that it is not the major headache that you thought it was.

Others may not agree on my reasons for being keen on service but I have two reasons for thinking the way I do and if you are really desperate for something to do on a Saturday teatime I’ll expand a bit……

1. One of my major clients is a lift company. They told me years ago that they do not make a penny on installing lifts in new buildings and were more than happy to break even. The real money in their business was made in service afterwards and that’s where they focussed their efforts.

2. Before getting into this game I was in the motor trade and when I tried to sell my garage I was fascinated by the attitude of the prospective buyers. The white skins were only interested in sales – how many cars do you sell a year, what’s the average retained gross profit etc etc. Those of a more dusky complexion were only interested in service – how many cars go through the workshop each day, what labour rate, mark-up on parts etc etc. I hope that doesn’t come across as racist, it isn’t meant to be, but that’s exactly the way it happened. There were no exceptions.

I thought that both types were being blinkered in only looking at a part of the whole and it got me thinking that if I could structure my new business, this one, so that I could make good profit on new sales and again on service afterwards then I should have it made.

It’s my day for long posts. I think I’ll go and lie down. 🙂