3M Commercial Solutions (St. Paul, MN) has announced the co-champions in its Wrap2Wrap Battle: Casey Folk from PDX Wraps (Sherwood, OR), and Jamie Mullican from www.wrapartist.com (Nashville). The candidates advanced through four rounds of online voting through 3M’s competition portal for their work with 3M Wrap Series 1080 vehicle-wrap film.
The Specialty Equipment Marketing Assn.’s (SEMA) annual tradeshow, which took place November 3-6 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, provided an ideal forum. SEMA serves as an umbrella organization that represents the far-reaching gamut of automotive-aftermarket products, which includes street-rod components, special effects, and, yes, vehicle wraps. SEMA presumably represents a growth market for vinyl manufactures in general, and vehicle wraps in particular. Auto-restyling shops, dealers and even car-manufacturing representatives gain exposure to a strong value-ad product, and, through vinyl OEM’s presence at the show, take the first step towards forming partnerships with shops that complete vehicle wraps and enhance profits for wrap producers and their aftermarket-vendor customers.
The wrap-off took place on Thursday, November 5, and the celebrity judges will include Top Gear co-host Rutledge Wood, AMA Supercross champion Jeremy McGrath, 2014 Wrap2Wrap winner Steve Hargitai, hot-rod racer Ali Youngblood and 3M Authorized Trainer Adam Sumner.
3M Certified Preferred Graphics Installers assisted Folk and Mullican with installing their projects. They included John Duever, president of St. Louis-based Vinyl Images LLC; Joshua Marquardt, owner of Art City Signs (Oshkosh, WI); Mingo Richter, owner of Blackbox-Richter (Sharderberg, Germany), and Luis Tirado, owner of WBC Graphics (Apopka, FL).
Folk and Mullican earned prize packages worth more than $10,000 – they included all-expense-paid trips to the SEMA show, $1,000 cash, rolls of 3M Wrap Film Series 1080 media, a Master Proheat STC® PH-1610K heat-gun kit, a package of GeekWraps wrap-installation tools and paid advertising on 3M’s social-media accounts.
Janelle Pizzi, 3M Commercial Solutions’ product marketer, said, “The skill and talent level displayed by Casey Folk and Jamie Mullican with [Series 1080 film] was simply astounding. We look forward to seeing their future work, while they both undoubtedly continue to influence others to produce outstanding work.”