A high visibility branding wrap project for Ikea in central London has involved the use of PVC-free Kavalan banner material by Embrace Building Wraps, printed on EFI wide-format printers.

A giant recreation of Ikea’s Frakta bag was printed and installed in London’s Oxford Circus, involving 2878sqm of printed scaffold wraps on Kavalan Sunlight Weldable, across three elevations. The installation comprised five frames carrying a silhouette line drawing of the building behind, created by Embrace, and printed wraps that replicate the blue Frakta bag with 3D handles. The six wraps in total are about 400sqm, and the bag handles are 32m and 15m long. The printing was done on an EFI Vutek GS5000R UV roll-fed printer.

Embrace Building Wraps offers a project management service for digitally printed graphics, including scaffolding, building facades and module building. Managing director Greg Forster explained the choice of the Kavalan material: 

‘We carried out numerous on- and off-site print tests on solid PVC and mesh PVC but at the end of the day Kavalan Sunlight Weldable won the day. It performs well under tension, the print is bang on, the tiles and dragon tails weld nicely. To ensure the structural integrity of the material we conduced pull tests to ensure that the material is robust. It’s a far lighter material [than traditional PVC] so with a combined weight of 1150kg …vs 1725kg. So, the fact that it is 33% lighter helped on the engineers’ calculations and with lifting into position.

‘Kavalan withstands up to 774kg on average, suitable for the considerable stresses Mother Nature throws at our bespoke installs over the four seasons,’ he added. ‘Also, what is very key these days is fire rating. Now we know the substrate has a TS62, NFP, EN and DIN certifications. We also sent the material away to a UKAS-certificated facility in the UK, and that passed a BS 5867 type B test.’

The sustainability credentials of the job also hold up. According to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data, the 2878sqm of Sunlight Weldable used in the project saved 1410.2kg of CO2 equivalent, 31,370l of fresh water, 2.993kg PM2.5 particulate emissions equivalent and 552.5kg oil equivalent.