Fine to Be Free: FreeBee Wraps

The business idea was straightforward: buy a fleet of small electric vehicles, use them to offer free rides around Miami Beach, and wrap the vehicles in advertising to cover expenses and make some money. Thus Freebee was born; it began offering rides to passersby in early 2012.

But there was a problem: “We were outsourcing the printing and all the creative,” recalls co-founder and managing partner Jason Spiegel. “It was costing us $800 to $1000 for the vehicle wraps. It was a hurdle to charge that price to our clients.” The company entered into a partnership with a local marketing guru, Amir Youssef, founding BeeFree Media (www.beefreemedia.com) in early 2013. “BeeFree Media is the media side of our company – the printing, the creative, anything that has to do with the marketing side for the FreeBee,” Spiegel says.

BeeFree Media offers a wide variety of printing services, from large-format to offset, but the key for FreeBee was printing vehicle wraps. The company invested in a Roland VersaCamm VS-540 printer/cutter and started producing its own wraps, which made a big difference to the bottom line, cutting wrap costs to $200-250 per vehicle.

To wrap the Freebee vehicles, which are small buggies similar to golf carts, the shop uses 3M Controltac IJ180Cv3 and Scotchcal IJ35 graphic films. “A lot of the panels on our vehicles are flat,” Spiegel says, “so the IJ35 works out. When we have to wrap the front and the back, where it’s real curvy, we use the Cv3.”

FreeBee offers several advertising packages, depending on how much of the car the client wants to cover. “Depending on the client, they may pay for extras,” says Spiegel, “like the roll bar, the interior, the rims, and so on. On a normal wrap, we probably use about 350 square feet of material.” Applying the film takes about two or three hours, depending on how complex the job is.

It was a big year for vehicle wraps; read our full coverage here or look through the photo gallery.