Kirkham Marketing Question For Garage Therapy

[David Kirkham]

Fellow Car Nuts:

We have been working hard on studying ways to expand our offerings to the public. We have a marketing question and would appreciate any feedback you all could give.

How many of you would be interested in purchasing one of our cars at a significantly reduced price if you could do more of the work yourself—like A LOT more of the work?

The question of lowering the costs of the car particularly hit home this past week as we delivered several ”Garage Therapy-cars in a box” to our formerly fiberglass customers. I got to thinking…the “assembly” time for us was a couple of hours of packing parts in a box vs. the normally long drawn out process of completely assembling a car. Hmmmm…where else could we cut hours—and hence, cost—out of our car? Where else could we maximize value for our customers?

As I contemplate the production of our cars, I keep asking myself the same questions. What exactly do our customers buy from us? Why do customers buy from us? How can we get more customers to buy from us? What are our problems? What are the problems that face our industry?

I keep coming back to the same conclusions. We make aluminum bodies--no one else can do that (at least in the quality, quantity, price combination we do). We make cool billet suspensions that are the nicest I have seen anyone make anywhere--but I am sure anyone could put their mind to it and make them as well. We assemble cars really nicely--but, I am sure there are others who can as well. We sand and detail our cars really, really nicely--but I am sure others can as well, (just look at Brent Mill's, Allan Allarab's, Pat Buckley's, and Tom Decker's cars—(and on and on). They are all as nice as what we do--if not better.

Wait a minute...

We MAKE aluminum bodies—no one else can—BUT, we also sand, assemble, cut holes, etc, etc, etc, that ANYONE else can do. What would happen if we let customers do what they can do and we do what we can do? What other industry has customers who actually want to work on a product they buy? Customers can not generally weld and turn a flat sheet of aluminum into a body, but they CAN sand or paint a car so it looks really nice—and save money in the process.

I really got to thinking about the brushing of our cars and the enormous amount of time that takes. If our customers are going to paint their car, then all of that time is a complete waste.

ALL CARS START OUT LIFE LOOKING LIKE THIS. How many of you would be interested in purchasing one of our cars without all of the detail work on the aluminum so you could save money and do it yourself?

Of course, we would still sand, assembly, and detail cars for those customers who wanted to purchase them that way from us.

David