International Trucks, Juan Rueda
International Trucks needed a way to sell more than trucks: parts, maintenance, and aftersales support to an audience who rarely buys a new truck twice. That's how Juan Rueda was born, a character designed to talk, help, and connect with drivers the way one of their own would, turning even competitors' customers into fans
Role
UX designer and copywriter
Outcome
Higher sales volume of spare parts and after-sales service
Designing for the Real End User
International Trucks came to this project with a clear business problem: truck sales are infrequent, and repeat purchases are rare, so growth had to come from somewhere else: maintenance, parts, and aftersales support. That reframed who we needed to design for. It wasn't the person signing the purchase order, it was the person behind the wheel every day, the drivers Colombians call camioneros.
That shift mattered because truck drivers are a highly specific audience with their own language, their own needs, and their own way of seeking help. Understanding how they talk about their vehicles, what kind of support they trust, and where they go looking for it was the foundation for everything that followed, research that went well beyond a typical UX discovery process into building real cultural and linguistic understanding of the user.
Bringing Juan Rueda to Life
From that research came Juan Rueda: a character built to represent the standard Colombian truck driver: honest, hardworking, spending long hours on the road, and deeply knowledgeable about how his vehicle works. Designing Juan Rueda meant more than a brand, it meant giving him a voice, a communication style, a website, and contact channels that felt authentic to the audience he represented.
Through WhatsApp, Facebook, email, and newsletters, drivers could reach out to Juan Rueda directly for help like where to find parts, how to solve a problem, which stops on the road were reliable. The result went beyond International's own customer base: drivers of competing truck brands started following Juan Rueda too, treating him as a trusted reference in the industry. That familiarity translated into measurable business impact, increased parts and aftersales revenue, and a brand perceived as genuinely closer to the real needs of the people driving the trucks, not just the people buying them.