Product photo to

The job

Drift Apparel needed a run of storefront window decals — 60 units across three colors, cut on a GraphTec plotter. It was a Tier 2 vinyl job on a tight clock.

The problem with the source

There was no vector file to work from — just a product photo of the mark. A raster photo has no clean outlines a plotter can follow, and auto-tracing a photo leaves the ragged, open paths that snag the blade and tear on the weed. To cut and weed cleanly across 60 units, the artwork had to be rebuilt as true vector geometry.

What we did

We hand-traced the mark from the photo into weed-friendly outlines — closed paths sized so the vinyl lifts away cleanly rather than fighting the blade. Each of the three colors was separated onto its own plotter-ready layer, and we added contour cut and overcut marks so the GraphTec registers and finishes each decal accurately at production size.

The production result

Drift Apparel had the files in hand 15 hours after checkout: three color-separated, weed-ready layers with contour and overcut marks, sized for the 60-unit storefront decal run. The decals dropped straight onto the GraphTec and cut clean — no tracing, no path cleanup, no re-weeding.