How Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) leveraged BrandMuscle to manage 3,000+ truck wraps

Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) is a 120+-year-old, family-owned business. You may know them as the second-largest beverage alcohol distributor of premium wine and spirits in the United States.

Like most bev-alc distributors, they rely on a team of sales and distribution reps; however, they also support localized marketing efforts by offering suppliers “truck wrap” promotions.

A truck wrap is a marketing strategy where a vehicle — precisely, a truck — is partially or fully covered with some type of ad. Take the truck wrap below, for example.

RNDC boasts a fleet of 3,000+ trucks (and vans) that transport its various alcohol to bars, stores, and restaurants. Creative, colorful graphics printed on vehicles’ sides expose brands to countless consumers.

Always on the move, RNDC needed to manage their 24-hour mobile billboards strategically — to keep as many on the road as possible. A parked truck is not nearly as impactful as one “on the road.”

However, RNDC managed its fleet manually on Excel spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets posed a few significant challenges:

• Inability to keep vehicle details organized and up-to-date (certainly not in real-time)
• Inefficiencies in proactively creating new wraps as new contracts were signed and existing ones ended
• Scaling and logistical nightmares with truck wraps happening in 20+ states and the District of Columbia
• The overall complexity of national contracts, nationwide inventory management, tax assessments, and accounting

It was time for a change.

RNDC partnered with BrandMuscle for a more straightforward, more efficient online system that could manage active assets, contracts, billing, and taxes all in one place.

In the BrandMuscle platform, we built RNDC a detailed, actionable dashboard to track vehicles’ make, model, year, VIN, location, and lifespan.

The dashboard also included fields for when vehicles needed replacement, whether vehicles were already wrapped (or not), and so on. In addition, the dashboard listed detailed production attributes — which graphic appeared on the truck, the date of installation, and a place for before/after pics. Plus, these “after” pictures were uploaded into BrandMuscle’s Proof Gallery portal — creating a one-stop shop for suppliers to view completed truck wraps.

Suppliers no longer rely on outdated, error-prone, not-sure-where-the-data-is, complicated spreadsheets.

Since leveraging the BrandMuscle Design Tracker system, suppliers always know where their truck promotions are, when contracts expire/renew, and which truck panels are available.

The BrandMuscle platform has helped streamline the creative, production, and billing processes while solving RNDC’s tax assessment challenges.

RNDC also receives daily reports notifying them of soon-to-expire trucks to better optimize promotion space.

The results:

• A single dashboard to track vehicle data, promotion rotation data, and production attributes
• Easy-to-find (< 1 minute) truck panel availability

BrandMuscle has helped RNDC strengthen its brand, improve and optimize processes, and keep the wheel churning.