It’s not easy running a car automotive shop in Singapore
Over the past few months, 30 to 40 customers have turned up at Vos Automotive with the same problem. They paid deposits to car-wrap shops that closed before finishing the job, and now they want Vos to complete or touch up their cars.
Three or four wrap shops in Singapore have shut recently, according to Tsuri, co-founder of Vos. She and her husband, Isaiah Chu, both 37, say the closures have little to do with workmanship.
“Actually, we survive because we calculate,” Isaiah says.
Vos hasn’t had an easy run either. It lost money for two years, spent more than S$600,000 in cash on its own unit, and paid for a recall out of its own pocket while still in the red. Here is what running a wrap shop looks like from inside one, as told by a former marketer who now spends her days on the shop floor.
The move from white-collar to blue-collar
Before Vos Automotive, Tsuri worked in sales and marketing, work she describes as mundane and “cookie-cutter”: “I will just take this skill set, fit it into this row and then just repeat and repeat and repeat.”
She eventually left full-time employment for freelance marketing and design work, without a clear plan for what came next.
In the background, she and her husband, Isaiah Chua, had been angel investors in a separate spray-paint business since around 2015.
Around 2019, during COVID, an acquaintance who worked at a car-wrapping company approached the couple with a pitch to branch out into vinyl wraps as a separate venture. After three months of planning, Vos Automotive was set up by the trio, with Tsuri responsible for the company’s marketing and design.
However, that changed when Singapore’s COVID-era labour crunch left the shop short-staffed, and Tsuri found herself watching, through her office window, a single installer struggling alone on a car in an otherwise empty workshop.
Curiosity got the better of her, and so Tsuri started asking questions, then helping. She began with something forgiving—a flat, four-cornered car door on a vehicle to wrap.
Eventually, she started helping out with her team member as she learned from him and refined her techniques, getting the hang of car-wrapping in months.
Today, besides offering stock wraps, Tsuri also designs bespoke wraps that gives Vos Automotive the edge in catering to various customer needs.
It hasn’t always been easy as a woman in the trade: older workers at partner firms avoided her eye and replied only to her male colleague. “As long as I get the job done, I really don’t mind,” she says.
Two years in the red before making something
The first two years were tough by any measure.
Sales were slow, with Vos doing around three cars a month against running costs of about S$10,000 monthly, and losing money the whole time.
However, by the third year in 2021, sales gradually picked up, and revenue had climbed to roughly half a million dollars after Tsuri started recording videos of herself wrapping cars and posting online, though growth “was not linear.”
But at the same time, rent more than doubled, by Tsuri’s account, after COVID.
Rather than renew at the new rate, Vos bought its own industrial unit at OneKA@MacPherson, moving in with a soft opening around Mar 2025.
This was a big investment for Vos that cost them S$1.5 million, but it made more financial sense for the founders in the long-run.
“Buying a unit is not for everyone, because it really eats into the business like crazy,” Isaiah says. “We were super broke.”
Why wrap shops struggle
Vos offers two main services: vinyl wraps, which change a car’s look, and paint protection film (PPF), a clear film that shields the paint.
Tsuri says each material has its own installation technique, and she can’t say which is harder, because it depends on the brand, the product series and the car itself. A McLaren 720S’s curves, for example, are far more demanding than a BMW 3 Series.
Vos focuses on entry-level German and Japanese cars, the bulk of what’s on Singapore’s roads, rather than the supercars people assume a wrap shop lives off.
Pricing, Tsuri says, isn’t just the cost of material: customers could buy the vinyl themselves, but they’re paying for the expertise that keeps their car from being scratched or damaged during installation.
On business growth, Tsuri and Isaiah were very candid about the scalability of such a business. The couple boiled it down to the mathematics of such a business, which hits a bottleneck of the physicality of the business.
The business’s real constraint is physical space. Vos’ interior can only accomodate to four cars at a time.
One car typically takes two to three days to wrap, and even at a theoretical maximum of one car a day, that’s 24 cars a month, with rest days included.
At about S$3,000 a car, that’s roughly S$ 72,000 in monthly revenue, which looks highly profitable on paper—until rent, staff salaries, utilities and materials come out of it.
Outsiders tend to see a competitor’s price tag and assume that the margins must be enormous.
What they don’t see is that a single installation mistake, like having to redo an entire panel’s worth of material, can double the cost of that one job outright.
Isaiah emphasised that turning a profit in this line of work is harder than it looks, and that’s not unique to car wrapping — it’s the same trap a lot of Singapore’s service businesses fall into.
Competing with Johor Bahru on price isn’t an option either, given the gap in exchange rates and operating costs. Trying is “a straight path to kill yourself,” he says. “We make sure that we play our own game.”
For Vos, that means educated customers: there are now more discerning shoppers who arrive after researching with AI, asking about tensile strength, UV ratings and what the warranty covers.
Growth without more shops
Today, Vos runs with three staff plus Tsuri, who aim to wrap about four car wraps a week.
That number climbs around the June and December school holidays and the run-up to Chinese New Year. With capacity fixed, Tsuri doesn’t want more outlets because “Singapore is only so small.”
She thinks more physical shops would mostly add management overhead.
Instead, Vos is chasing steadier business-to-business work. Fleet contracts with companies that need dozens of vehicles wrapped at once smooth out the unpredictability of one-off consumer jobs, which can hinge on customers leaving their cars with the shop while they’re overseas. Corporate clients include Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT).
Vos is also branching beyond cars into architectural film, wrapping kitchen cabinets, wardrobes, doors and air-con units in homes and offices.
The idea came from testing the technique on their own home about two years ago: curved car panels turned out to be harder than a flat cupboard door. It has grown into resurfacing yellowed or dated carpentry for homeowners who don’t want to tear it out, and matching air-con units to freshly painted walls.
For the smallest jobs, like a single air-con unit, Vos can also make low hundreds of dollars for each job.
Bigger residential projects can be considerably more lucrative per hour of labour than a car. For instance, one landed-house kitchen took three staff a single day.
Every Vos staff member is now cross-trained to handle architectural jobs alongside vehicles, giving the shop a second, less space-constrained revenue stream to lean on.
Hiring is the other squeeze. “Oh my god. It’s so difficult,” Tsuri says.
Vos only takes installers with baseline experience in vinyl or paint protection film (PPF), since it doesn’t have the bandwidth to train someone from scratch.
Singaporean interest in this kind of blue-collar craft work is close to zero. The shop has had promising local candidates who didn’t work out, and between the physical conditions and modest pay, it’s a hard sell. “The hit is almost zero,” she says, so the team relies mostly on skilled workers from across the Causeway.
Is it the switch to blue-collar worth it?
By her own account, Tsuri’s income dropped by roughly half when she left her freelance marketing behind, and other sacrifices have been real.
She’s given up manicures entirely, since the job doesn’t forgive long nails, and the hours can be just as unpredictable as freelancing ever was, with urgent jobs for corporate clients landing on short notice.
However, she says that the trade-offs have been worth it.
Now, “I’m a lot happier, and it’s something I wake up and look forward to what I’m doing.” Burnout is “really real”, but she’s taking breaks to pace herself and she isn’t looking for any a reason to leave.
