Holiday Vinyl Wrap Collection

The holiday vinyl wrap collection was a new product line: brand new finishes on select planter styles that didn’t exist yet in physical form. Marketing needed imagery to launch the campaign and drive pre-orders from professional plantscapers, a B2B audience that typically relies on seeing physical product before committing to an order.

Photography wasn’t an option. Nothing was in production yet. 3D rendering was the only way to get credible product imagery in time for the campaign deadline. The project started as a request for holiday imagery using existing planter colors, then expanded to include the full vinyl wrap line, holiday-specific environmental renders, and eventually look books built from the same assets.

The September deadline created structure, but scope kept evolving as the project grew. Managing that while keeping the imagery consistent across 13 patterns and 24 planter styles required staying organized about what had been delivered and what was still in progress.

Pattern development and 3D production ran in parallel. Stock patterns were identified, adapted to the company’s colorways, and resized for large-format vinyl wrap production. For the character wraps, the artwork was original, illustrated and built in Adobe Illustrator from scratch. The marketing team provided input throughout, adding pattern choices and giving feedback on directions. Creative direction of the image style and composition was mine.

Audience informed pattern selection from the start. Commercial holiday installations trend toward classic, versatile themes that translate across hospitality, retail, and corporate environments. That guided the direction toward plaid, traditional motifs, and character designs. B2C required a warmer, more personal feel, so some renders were produced specifically for that context with styling adjusted accordingly.

The character wrap illustrations required studying what was already in the market to land on something recognizable without being generic. Production viability ran through every decision: scale, repeat, and bleed were built into the graphics from the start.

On the 3D side, each pattern required its own material setup in Substance Designer, with UV mapping checked across 24 planter styles. Cylindrical, cube, and globe shapes each handled pattern alignment differently, and character art required particular attention to scale and placement to read correctly on curved and angular surfaces.

Once patterns were approved, they moved into Substance Designer for material creation and then into the 3D pipeline. Existing planter models from the product library served as the base. Renders were produced at resolutions appropriate for web, social, and print from the start, with compositions framed to adapt across formats without re-rendering. Final assets were organized into web hero images, social media assets, and print-ready production files.

The visual direction balanced festive appeal with the restraint that professional and commercial environments require. Patterns needed to feel holiday-appropriate without limiting where the planters could be placed.

The character illustrations set the tone for the more expressive end of the collection. Drawn and refined in Illustrator, they had to work at the scale of a large planter wrap: detailed enough to read as craft, simple enough to hold up at distance.

Environmental renders were warm and considered rather than overtly decorative. The planters were the focus, with surrounding elements supporting the mood without competing. B2C renders were styled with a warmer, more personal feel, while B2B compositions stayed cleaner and more architectural.

The completed project delivered 60-plus optimized images across web, social, and print formats, covering 13 vinyl wrap patterns applied across 24 planter styles. Each pattern was rendered across multiple shapes and sizes, with compositions built to work across different aspect ratios without re-rendering.

The character wrap illustrations were produced as standalone assets in addition to their use in the 3D renders, serving as production-ready artwork for the vinyl wrap manufacturing process. All pattern files were delivered with technical specifications for large-format print production.

Look books were assembled from the render library and a landing page concept was developed in Figma presenting the full collection.

The renders gave the team something to launch with before a single physical product existed. Marketing had a complete image library across formats, sales had look books for client conversations, and the vinyl wrap artwork was production-ready for manufacturing.

The scope grew significantly from the original brief, but the core deliverable was met: credible imagery of a product line that didn’t yet physically exist.

The landing page direction was developed and presented but not implemented before the project concluded.

A project that spans pattern design, original illustration, 3D production, and print-ready file delivery is as much a production management challenge as a creative one. Keeping those threads moving toward the same deadline meant staying organized about dependencies and sequencing, particularly since decisions in the pattern phase had direct consequences in the 3D pipeline.

Working across Illustrator, Substance Designer, Blender, and Cinema 4D within the same project required a level of context switching that became more fluid as the pipeline solidified.

The character illustration work was the most distinct part of the project creatively. Shifting between illustration and 3D production within the same project reinforced how much the work benefits from knowing which mode of thinking a problem actually needs.