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Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealer Conference 2020

February 20, 2020

At the end of January, the Auto Curators team took a break from our much-loved stomping ground of Surrey, Sussex, Greater London, Hampshire and Scotland. It was time for a team trip to one of the highlights of our year, the Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealer Conference. If you follow me on social, you’ll have seen a few snaps from the trip. But, I think it’s always important to write a round-up on our website. This conference is as important to you, our customers, as it is to us. That’s because it ensures we continue to offer you the very best service possible.

Technology moves continuously in our business. Cars change all the time, driven by design, cost management and environmental concerns. Paint chemistry, vehicle shapes and substrate behaviours consistently evolve. As Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealers, we need to understand all of these changes to provide the correct solution for you.

As a side note, it’s also fair to say that the trip is a lot of fun, so as a team, it’s great to do something like this together. Paul hired a small piece of the American dream, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, to get us from Houston airport to San Antonio and back, so we all enjoyed the road trip part too!

Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealer Conference 2020:

The two-day Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealer Conference is always a fantastic opportunity to share ideas and learn from other professionals in the same field. There is a solid base of practices to work from when installing PPF. That said, there are also a lot of tweaks that individuals incorporate to help make the job easier and raise the quality of the install. Sometimes, these can be quite counter-intuitive, so having someone explain or show you how their method works can be incredibly enlightening.

The Auto Curators team left our bases in Hampshire and Scotland a day or so earlier than we needed to… We also wanted to take the opportunity to visit the Xpel HQ facilities, located around San Antonio, Texas.

When we arrived at the conference, we joined 307 Xpel Paint Protection Film dealers attending, from all over the world. Including the USA, the UK, Mainland Europe, Sweden, Dubai, Australia, Japan and Korea.

Competitions:

Installation competitions are a fun part of the conference.

Paul and Matt both had a go at the competition this year, and it was tough! Seventy people start. The first round is to install a front wing and a two-piece wing mirror. But the tricky part is completing this in just 7 minutes, to a retail-ready standard.

Now the thing is (here come the excuses), we work to produce the best quality job we can, not the fastest. So, working under a time pressure like that wasn’t very easy. The judges are basing their marks on three things. All fluid being eliminated, all the edges being perfectly aligned and stuck down, and minimal contamination under the film. The judges make allowances for the fact we work on white cars, on a carpet, in a hotel conference facility. This is all a far throw from our usual clean working environment! Getting the wing on the car wasn’t too much of a problem, but wing mirrors are a nightmare at the best of time. These proved to be the downfall for both Paul and Matt.

Seventy contestants take part in the first round of the competition; just 14 can make it through to round 2. We need to get practising for next time!

Product Launches:

  • A 40% thicker film was launched this year. This is intended for applications that will benefit from even more protection, mainly aimed at the track day/racecar market. That said, this new film has applications for regular road cars too, in selected areas.
  • We were also advised that an opaque black PPF product will launch at some point during 2020.
  • Additionally, the software programme we use as a database, and to control the cutting plotter, (DAP (Design Access Programme)) has a significant update coming. We were able to use the new software, DAP 11. It was helpful to explore the new features and benefits with the team responsible for developing it. We also gave input on features we’d like to see introduced, and on existing features that we felt could work better in a real-world situation.

Upskilling:

We learnt some brilliant techniques for managing film over particularly awkward shapes and really large panels. For example, the latest generation of Aston Martin’s, such as the Vantage or DBS Superleggera both have huge ‘clamshell’ bonnets, where the front wings and bonnet are all in one. This has required the introduction of a 72” wide roll of film, bigger than any plotter available. This means we fit the film in bulk, not using a pre-cut pattern, and it needs to be managed quite differently. We learnt some great new techniques to make the best of this new film that we’re already putting into use with all our installs.

Highlights & Takeaways:

This year, the new format for the ‘Advanced Install Class’ was brilliant. It was led by Chris West of CCA Motorsport in Alaska. Chris has won the XDC competition five times and came second in 2019. He travels America as a trainer and problem solver, helping PPF installers with challenging and prestigious installs. His insight into best practices, different installation techniques, and managing common issues was worth the flight and ticket cost alone!

Additionally, our guest keynote speaker on Saturday afternoon was superb. Given he had the post-lunch slot, on the second day of the conference, when people were a little tired and emotional (there is a big group dinner on both evenings, where perhaps a little too much food and drink is consumed!). I think it’s fair to say there was a distinct lack of energy in the room, but Las Vegas musician and speaker, ‘Marvellous’ Mark Kamp had the whole place jumping! His message, as a motivational speaker, was that everyone should be a rockstar in their business, playing the ‘chords of change’, and really looked to inject energy into everyone’s business plan. 300+ people all banging drumsticks on the tables was quite an experience!

We’re proud to be an Xpel Paint Protection Film Dealer. We choose to align ourselves with Xpel because they share our core values and desire for excellence in everything we do. The phrase ‘that will do’ isn’t in their vocabulary, and we love that.

Once again we have come away from the conference reassured that by offering you Xpel PPF products we are offering our clients in Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire,  London and Scotland the very best.

So, if you are ready for your car to look a million dollars?

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Our good friend Pete, of @petrolheadtours came to see us this week with his recent purchase. This dramatic looking Morgan Aero 8 is a very rare Series 1 car, unbelievably over 20 years old now. 
I’m fortunate that I’ve had the chance to drive these before, and the old school looks don’t prepare you for the driving experience. A very light car by modern standards, it features an aluminium chassis similar to that in a Lotus Elise, but borrows it’s drivetrain from a BMW 540i - so, a 4.4 litre, naturally aspirated V8 is under the bonnet. 
Pete is only the third owner of this amazing car, but years of someone lovingly wiping dust off the paintwork with a dry cloth had left it looking as dull as a blackboard. 
After a careful wash, there was an even more careful machine polish to carry out. The shapes are extremely awkward, and thus time consuming, but the results were well worth it. Finished with Onyx Graphene Pro ceramic coating, Pete was quite taken aback with the results when he collected it. We look forward to seeing it again at events this summer. 
Want the same for you car? Get in touch, we can help you. 
#autocurators #morgan #aero8 #detailing #paintcorrection #hampshire #hook #basingstoke #ceramiccoating #onyxgraphenepro
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Q: When is a Yaris not your regular Yaris?
A: When it’s a Toyota Yaris GR!
We recently had the pleasure of welcoming one of these amazing cars to our studio for XPEL PPF installation. Find out more about the project in our latest blog article… Visit our dedicate PPF website ‘PPF On My Car’ from the link in our bio.
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This super rare Alpina B3 Touring left us this afternoon, after we installed our Extended Front end PPF package. 
Having been delivered to us directly from Sytner Nottingham, on a covered trailer, we carried out a full new car preparation, before installing Xpel Ultimate Plus over the whole front, the sills, pillars and a rear luggage strip. We ceramic coated the paintwork and wheels, and protected the beautiful interior. This car will get lots of use, and should now stay looking like this for a long time. 
#autocurators #alpina #alpinab3 #sytner #xpel #ppf #hampshire #hook #basingstoke #reading #detailing #paintprotection #newcar #xpelhampshire
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