Firm Is Tops in the Top Market : Pacific Auto Accessories Was an Idea That Started Small and Grew Into the Industry’s No. 1 Company
Bob Richards acknowledges that ripping the top off a $30,000 car can wrench an auto owner’s heart.
“Yeah, you see it happening and you think, ‘This is my baby. What’s happening to her.’ ”
But Richards’ crews always replace what they remove, generally with either a tinted glass panel called a moon roof or with a T-top. Moon roofs (like their solid counterparts, sunroofs) either pop up or slide back to open up the center of a car’s roof. T-Tops are roofs with removable glass side panels that store in the trunk and leave the car looking a lot like a convertible with the back window still up.
The two products have become popular alterations in recent years, and Richards, who pioneered the business of designing and installing them, is one of the Southland’s major pitchmen for replacement roofs.
His Huntington Beach-based company, Pacific Auto Accessories, has been profitable every year since he started it in 1978, Richards said, largely because the major auto manufacturers are simply too big to redesign a part of their production lines to handle the demand in-house.
So, Richards and others in the after-market roof industry have designed specialty roofs for dozens of cars.
Richards, the acknowledged industry leader in Southern California, has opened two more branches--installation shops in Los Angeles and San Diego--and has begun wholesaling his products to installers in other parts of the country. He also has grown beyond roof alterations, although they still provide the bulk of his business.
Pacific Auto Accessories also manufactures and markets a line of aerodynamic styling kits for a wide range of autos--including most General Motors and Ford models, several foreign cars and some Chrysler products. The kits include front air dams and side and rear “skirts” that extend the body lines of the car. They are modeled after racing car panels that route air flow in such a way that the pressure improves traction and reduces drag to add speed and reduce fuel consumption.
Pacific, which began making only T-tops and only for the Mazda RX-7, still has a soft spot for the little Japanese sports car and makes one other specialty product--a kit that adds a rear seat (a very small rear seat) to the two-passenger car.
For Pacific’s fiscal 1988, which ends June 30, sales of all these products are expected to top $10 million, said Richards, who owns 82% of the company. His 250 employees own the rest.
T-tops and moon roofs were the creation, like so many other auto add-ons, of independent customizers and had not yet caught the attention of auto industry executives nine years ago when Richards began tinkering in his garage.
A former sales executive for both General Motors and Mazda, Richards was running a Pontiac dealership at the time. His after-hours labors produced a T-top for the RX-7, and Richards soon began his own business.
In its first year, Pacific was so small that Richards made sales calls, operated the manufacturing equipment and even helped sweep up at night. The company began 1979 doing only RX-7s but by the end of the year had branched out to other makes and models. In all, Richards had 500 customers and about $500,000 in sales his first year in business.
Since then, interest in customized roof-lines has blossomed, some auto manufacturers are putting specialized roofs on some models at the factory, and Pacific has continued growing and diversifying. The company now installs 700 T-tops or moon roofs monthly.
Richards said his company’s three shops have installed about 35% of the T-tops and about 15% of the motorized moon roofs in Southern California. Pacific sells and installs a typical T-top for $1,295 and a motorized moon roof for $850 to $1,100. A hand-operated moon roof sells for several hundred dollars less.
After-market installers account for about 50% of Pacific’s sales, auto dealers provide 20% of the company’s revenue and retail customers and auto makers each account for about 15% of the company’s business.
The typical purchaser of a Pacific product is an auto enthusiast of “almost any age and almost any income range,” Richards said. “The buyers are sophisticated. It’s not a lot of kids who play around with taking out radios and putting in stereos on their own.”
Richards said Pacific’s products are designed for the long-run, not to satisfy passing fads. “Interest won’t go away, and even in a poor car market, car dealers will promote add-on products to boost slumping markets.”
A well-built, properly installed moon roof or T-top can add substantially to the resale value of a car, said a spokeswoman at Kelley Blue Book, the Irvine-based publisher of the industry-standard price list for used cars.
Although auto makers could rub out some of his market by increasing factory production of T-tops and moon roofs, Richards said he isn’t concerned about competition from them because a manufacturer would not find it economical to make such a wide choice of products.
Car makers’ specialty is making cars, he said, while Pacific’s is custom after-market products.
The most recent of those is a $1,200 fiberglass body, or coach, that bolts on behind the cab of a vehicle built by Daihatsu, a Japanese auto maker that it just entering the market here. Daihatsu asked Pacific to come up with the coach to create a “people mover” that seats nine passengers.
Richards said that Daihatsu plans to market the vehicle to the operators of resorts, sports stadiums, airports and other places where there is a need to provide transportation for small groups of people. The company expects to sell 25 vehicles a month.
