Rebrand and website for a truck tyre manufacturer

Bandvulc are one of our local website and design clients based just outside Plymouth in South Devon. They are the UK’s largest independent truck tyre retread manufacturer selling around 200,000 tyres a year with over 250 employees and sales of over £40M. The Bandvulc Group also embraces a rubber compound mixing operation, fleet management solutions, tyre maintenance and wholesale tyre distribution; hence their strapline ‘More than a tyre’.

We rebranded Bandvulc over twenty years ago with a bold, strong yellow wordmark on a black background. Meantime the company had grown in size and diversified its service offerings and inevitably the brand had become diluted and weakened. This time round we have re-worked the original brand by stripping it back to its core components and simplifying the family of logos and brand elements. We have followed the slope of the italic wordmark with a parallelogram container and parallel stripes.

Brand Guidelines

To help roll out the new brand we produced a 28 page brand guidelines manual along with a CD with a comprehensive suite of files. The guidelines contain full specifications of the various brand elements, rules and guidelines as well as examples of the main applications of the brand from stationery and signage through to PowerPoint presentations. The files include both image and vector graphic formats in RGB and CMYK colour models and font specifications.

Website

We built Bandvulc’s new website using the Expression Engine CMS which enables them to manage all of the content within an easy to use back end. The site is built around a long scrolling page with side shoots and uses parallax effects and jQuery sliders to animate the contents.

Printed Collateral

Leaflets have been produced for each of the twenty odd tyres in their range as well as a general company overview. The leaflets achieve a distinctive shape simply by folding A4 long edge to long edge. Tyres are not photogenic: picking out the tread pattern by carefully lighting curved black-on-black ridges and canyons was a challenge to both the photographer and Photoshop operator.

Truck Livery

Bandvulc’s distinctive fleet of trucks are, in effect, giant billboards steaming along the country’s motorways. As such they are the flagships of the brand. It would be tempting to use this exposure and highly visible space to show off the range or tyres or detail the service offerings. True to our mission to strip back and simplify, the truck livery is minimal – comprising of the group logo and strapline along with a simplified illustration of a running camel that was the very first logo 43 years ago.