All aboard! An express digital vinyl wrapping project

Large format digital print company PressOn helped to bring a British confectionery favourite to life overnight.

Chatham-based large format digital printer PressOn was tasked with an unusual branding project when a new Marks and Spencer (M&S) store opened at Lakeside shopping centre in the UK in November 2023.

“We deal with a number of shopping centres across the UK, working on their projects for commercialisation such as escalator graphics, lift graphics and hanging banners,” PressOn Project Manager Emma Smith says.
 
“On this occasion, we worked with Savills, which looks after commercialisation for Lakeside in Thurrock, Essex. Savills had told us that M&S were doing a campaign ahead of a new store launch. So, we were already doing escalator and lift graphics to tie in with this, but then we were contacted by M&S directly. 

“M&S had taken over the passenger train at Lakeside – a little train that usually takes children around Lakeside – but M&S had managed to convince Lakeside to let them rebrand it as the Percy Pig Express to reflect their famous Percy Pig sweets gift tin. They asked us for our thoughts, what products to use and how we thought we could go about turning the Lakeside train into the Percy Pig Express.”

Leave no trace

Because this was a time-limited promotion, and the train would have to revert to its normal appearance afterwards, it was crucial that any media used to transform it into the Percy Pig Express didn’t leave a lasting presence. Thanks to PressOn’s experience with printing and applying branding on taxis, Emma and the team knew exactly how to tackle this. 


“We used Metamark Taxi Media with a gloss laminate for the printing material. This is a really good product for this kind of project because this particular train had a lot of curved edges,” Emma says. This choice allowed the vinyl to conform to the unique shape of the train’s front while providing a high-end glossy finish for maximum visual impact.

“We initially suggested to M&S that they didn’t need to cover the front part of the train – which is very curved and has lots of intricate parts such as rivets – because that part of the train was already red. But as M&S are perfectionists they asked for everything to be covered with red vinyl, even if it was already red, so that we had exactly the same colour across the entire train.

“To ensure we had adequate coverage for the train, we overprinted the flood red – we made sure we had lots of bleed – and we printed lots of extra panels of red. That meant, if any of the dimensions were out in any way, we could then reduce the extra vinyl and fit it on-site so that we didn’t have any patches that weren’t covered.”

Putting Percy in place

While simply covering the intricate shape of the train was one challenge, a far bigger issue was the need to make sure the graphics of Percy Pig and friends appeared in exactly the right place. To achieve this, PressOn came up with an ingenious workaround.

“We had technical drawings of the train, but we weren’t 100% sure that they would be exactly accurate – for example, the drawings had numerous different sizes on them in different places. Our Operations Manager and I went down to Lakeside one evening with a tape measure and checked all of the sizes,” Emma says.

“Then we printed the Percy Pig elements of the branding as separate decals. We printed them, mounted them onto 5mm black Foamex, cut them separately and then installed on top of the flood red. If we had printed those graphics as part of the flood print and the measurements were incorrect and the Percy Pig graphics didn’t sit where they should, it would be very obvious and we would have had to produce another huge amount of printed media. 

“But with these design highlights as separate decals, we could install them in exactly the right spaces. It made the whole job a lot more flexible. In fact, a couple of days before installation, we went through all the different decals we needed and realised there were missing some, but it was a simple job just to get those printed and cut.”

The final hurdle to overcome was installing the print: PressOn’s team only had access to the train the night before M&S’s grand opening on November 15. 

“To ensure we achieved this successfully, we needed to bring a bigger team to apply the print. We had six people on-site installing the vinyl on the train that night – a team of four, as well as an additional team of two who we had pulled from our Lakeside escalator commercialisation staff.”

Fabulous feedback

The end result was fantastic – so much so that the effect of the Percy Pig Express wasn’t just felt in-person by visitors to Lakeside, it also became very popular on social media.

“M&S was very happy. M&S’s Assistant Local Marketing Manager Amy Coleman put a LinkedIn post thanking us at PressOn, and video of the Percy Pig Express appeared on the global M&S Facebook page,” PressOn’s Social Media and Marketing manager Charlotte Webb says.

“This was certainly one of the most exciting projects for us because it meant we could help a brand make some great memories for children, especially as it was during just before Christmas. It was really rewarding for us in that sense, but M&S also gave us some fantastic feedback and it had a big impact on social media, so we were thrilled.”

On a personal and professional level, Emma was especially pleased with the outcome.
“It is probably one of my favourite projects that I have worked on. I was very excited to go down to Lakeside out of hours to see the train. Working with M&S is such a pleasure – it’s such a big name and Percy Pig is such an iconic product, so this project was very precious. 

“No matter how long I have been doing this, I still think it is crazy how things can go from being a sheet of vinyl to conforming to the shape of the train so well. Seeing the finished product was a real shock, but it was incredible.”