‘This thing took off’: Huntington Beach auto detailer used TikTok to help open her own garage
Jessica Tran did not necessarily think she would last this long in the auto-detailing world.
Starting out as a 16-year-old at Marina High School, the Huntington Beach native worked in mobile detailing on the weekends with her girls’ basketball coach.
At the time, the allure of a $20 bill was big. But after graduating and getting her associate degree at Golden West College, a funny thing happened.
Tran kept going, establishing JT Mobile Detailing.
“I ended up working with him part time once I graduated high school, and then over the years kept sticking at mobile detailing,” she said. “Ended up doing it by myself, it evolved into a full-time job, and the last two years we’ve been here.”
Half a lifetime later, “here” is Studio 94, her Huntington Beach detailing garage that she opened in 2022. It’s a play on Studio 54 that instead features the year she was born and even has a disco ball in the middle of the work area.
Tran, who turns 30 this year, is definitely a personality, and she’s used that to her advantage on social media. She started documenting her business on TikTok about three years ago with fun videos.
She now has 1.7 million followers at @jtmobiledetailing.
“It sounds super-corny and lame to say, but TikTok did change the trajectory of my career entirely,” Tran said. “I don’t think I would have kept up with this, if it weren’t to this scale. I think at some point, I really would have done what my mom would have wanted, buckled down and got a white-collar job. But luckily, this thing took off.”
The brick-and-mortar business has benefited her in myriad ways. She no longer has to coordinate trips to clients with her workers, and she’s no longer in the sun all day.
She hired four other detailers as part of her team, including Daulton Lantow of Westminster.
“I started as a fan and still am to this day,” Lantow said. “I still wait for her videos. I still learn from her every day, from the content that she puts out. She’s a great detailer and content creator, for sure. She knows what she’s doing.”
Her videos have also helped pay dividends financially. Tran said. She’s been able to support both herself and her girlfriend, who is in graduate school.
“TikTok took my mobile business and blew it up 200%,” she said. “But with having this shop, I was able to blow it up another 200% in sales, just because we could expand and do tinting and films.”
TikTok says that 28,000 jobs were supported by small and medium-sized businesses’ use of the app as an ad platform in California. But a measure to outlaw the popular app has earned approval by Congress and was signed by President Biden last week.
The measure gives Beijing-based parent company ByteDance up to a year to sell the company, or TikTok will be banned in the United States.
Tran hopes that doesn’t happen. Her garage allows the crew to work on several cars at once.
On one recent weekday, Tran grinned as she showed off a Japanese Kei truck in one corner and a 1992 Honda NSX supercar in another corner.
“I love Japanese cars,” Tran said, though she admits about 20% of her clientele brings her Teslas. “I talk about them a lot.”
On this particular day, a customer from as far away as San Diego sits in the waiting room. Tran said that wouldn’t have been possible without her TikTok fame.
Her mother, Jocelyn, hasn’t even asked her to go back to college for a few years now.
“Coming from a traditional Asian family ... my brother has a doctorate, and I dropped out of college and work with my hands all day,” Jessica Tran said, again smiling. “It was not something she was hyped on. Now that I’ve got a brick and mortar, she sees it as more legit.”
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
