Street-Driven Success
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Dave Arnold prefers his ’32 Fords and his late 1960’s Chevy Chevelles, and he couldn’t be blamed for having poor taste; both models are perennial favorites with hot-rod enthusiasts. Arnold, however, is not your run-of-the mill car maniac. He’s also the founder and president of CarTech Inc. a publisher of do-it-yourself automotive guides, based in North Branch, Minn.
In a phone interview, CarTech Inc. Vice President and General Manager Molly Koecher spoke of Arnold’s vehicular preferences as she described the company’s specialty. “Our focus is in performance modification. We’re very specialized, a bit different than Chilton’s [a widely-read publisher of automotive guides], where vehicle maintenance and repair is the focus,” she said.
Performance modification is the art and science of retooling factory-built automobile engines to achieve higher speeds, handling or mileage. One example of performance modification is customizing carburetors and fuel injector systems to improve fuel efficiency; another is increasing torque, the twisting force that delivers power from a car’s engine to its driveshaft, which in turn produces a car’s acceleration.
Such automotive tinkering is popular with hot-rodders, car enthusiasts who restore and revamp antique cars. Though hot-rodders often race each other, they just as often cruise through towns intimidating their neighbors with roaring, rumbling custom engines, or show off their washed and waxed possessions at VFW car shows and fairgrounds across the nation.
The pastime has a devoted following that meets at hot-rod clubs and subscribes to magazines like Popular Hot Rodding and Hot Rod Magazine. Customizing and maintaining cars like the sleek ’63 Buick Riviera and ’67 Dodge Challenger, currently featured online at Hot Rod Magazine, requires plenty of disposable income. An onlooker might wonder how the recent economic downturn will affect hobbies like these.
Lee Egerstrom, a research fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Minnesota 2020, fears local businesses like CarTech Inc. will bear the brunt of a recession because they do not produce goods or services essential to the economy. Egerstrom said that consumers will purchase less “impulse-buy stuff” such as gifts and books and focus instead on paying for food, shelter and fuel. Many Minnesota-based small businesses, Egerstrom said, are niche industries like jewelry designers, toy builders and book publishers that cater to a specific consumer market.
Niche indeed: Titles listed on CarTech Inc.’s website like “How to Rebuild the Small-Block Mopar” and “Slingshot Spectacular: The Front-engine Dragster Era” sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. “People using our books tend to come in with a bit of understanding of the engines and systems,” Koecher said, noting that their company’s target audience is experienced car hobbyists, not newcomers. CarTech Inc.’s core bestsellers include guides on how to rebuild and improve Chevy and Ford engines.
Website excerpts of “Fulies: Fuel Injected Corvettes 1957-1965” reinforce the company’s esoteric appeal: “Corvettes manufactured between 1957 and 1965 and equipped with fuel injection systems atop their small-block engines are given special respect by enthusiasts. . . In addition to the rough exhaust note created by the high compression ratio and long-duration camshaft, gearheads could identify Corvettes with the fuel injection unites by the distinctive hiss they produced at idle.”
Niche or not, CarTech Inc. does widespread business. In addition to its website and catalog services, CarTech Inc.’s books are distributed through major retailers like Barnes and Noble. Koecher said the company is currently cranking out more than a dozen new titles each year. CarTech Inc. has over 40 titles currently in print.
While it contracts printing to an outside firm, CarTech Inc. employs more than a dozen people at its North Branch headquarters, where the layout, editing, marketing of each book is conducted. CarTech Inc. also warehouses its book inventory in North Branch.
CarTech Inc. has only two main competitors, one of which – MBI Publishing – is based in Minneapolis, though Koecher said that her company has partnered with MBI on certain projects. Koecher said MBI Publishing is more geared to the historical aspect of automotive history, and not toward how-to guides.
Whatever the current economic situation, the folks at Car Talk Books are not worried. “We’re niche enough, fined-tuned enough to resist downturns,” Koecher said. After over a dozen years with the company, Koecher said that CarTech Inc. had survived similar downturns; she also noted that the company would probably experience growth this year, though she declined to share specific numbers.