Shop Wraps First Tesla Cybertruck in Hawaii

JON LAUNER, OWNER of 808Wraps (Kapolei, HI), was looking for a way to promote his shop by offering to wrap the first of the new Tesla Cybertrucks for free. Sponsor of a local radio show, he put the word out over the airwaves but someone who hadn’t even heard the offer “just called out of the blue,” Launer says.

That client, Mike Marblestone, a pilot with a home in Kapolei, would soon take delivery of a Cybertruck due to his son’s connection as a former Tesla employee. This particular vehicle would be the very first to arrive in Hawaii, Launer says. While waiting, Launer and Marblestone negotiated a contract allowing 808Wraps to include its branding as part of the wrap. When the Cybertruck arrived, templates weren’t yet available, so the team started by taking photos of the vehicle and writing in the measurements.

As a starting point for the design, Marblestone provided an AI-generated image of red-hot lava. Launer turned to WRAPTOR, Jesùs Chichino Gutièrrez (Mexico), to bring the design along. The process required at least 10-12 rounds of proofing, Launer recalls. “We’d nail down the driver’s side first, then the next side, then try to blend them together,” he says. Wraptor’s final version in Illustrator was applied to BadWrap templates — which had just become available — in 808Wrap’s Photoshop.

The shop used their Canon Colorado 1630 UVgel roll-to-roll printer to image Avery Dennison MPI 1005 SC Easy Apply RS vinyl film, then their Kala Arkane 1650 laminator to apply Avery Dennison DOL1300Z overlaminate. The production team increased the saturation using Caldera RIP software.

The Cybertruck arrived hardly in pristine condition. “It had some nasty fingerprints on it as well as some rust and dents,” Launer says. “I assumed it had been sitting in a parking lot for many months.” Launer got in touch with a friend who’d handled a Cybertruck shortly before. The friend warned that “you can really mess it up if you don’t do it right,” he recalls, “so he came out and took care of the fingerprints and scratches, and deionized the whole thing so the surface would be nice and tacky.”

Regarding the install, the biggest issue presented itself in the vehicle’s “really small, thin edges, especially the points where they come together,” Launer says. This being their first Cybertruck, 808Wraps experimented, wrapping horizontally on one side, vertically on the other. “Above the window where it comes to an apex is also difficult but we just flush-cut everything,” he says. “Justin Pate [CEO of The Wrap Institute] has since said that’s the way to do it. After you flush-cut it you come around again and shave it one more time. You go through a whole bunch of blades but it’s probably best.” The install team used cotton swabs thinner than Q-Tips to apply promoter along the edge so it would hold. “We didn’t want any lifting,” Launer says.

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As part of the contract, for the first couple weeks Launer could drive the Cybertruck around to promote 808Wraps. “I couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed,” Launer says. The reactions were funny and strange. Someone asked, “Is that a tank?” Everyone asked, “How much?” Launer says that Hawaiians always want to know “how much?”

A month after 808Wraps delivered the Cybetruck to Marblestone, he contacted the shop to say the Turo auto rental company he’d been working with had blacklisted his car due to the 808Wraps logo, which Turo considers non-allowable advertising. “We had to remove the only branding we had on the vehicle,” Launer says. However, “this voided our contract so he wound up paying full price minus a month, prorated for our advertising,” he adds. Despite that, the client’s still happy.

“We received a lot of attention from this project,” Launer says. “People know us from that wrap. It’s evident when they call.”

PHOTO GALLERY (4 IMAGES)

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