In the automotive service market, custom paint shops are in the unique and enviable position of having customers that are almost always happy to see them. It's rare that anyone willingly goes to a collision repair shop; your customers are there because they just wrecked their cars. At a custom shop, the customer is there because he loves his car.
At Kelly & Son – Crazy Painters in Bellflower, Calif., – the customers also show up because of the reputation of Tom and Mitch Kelly, a father/son duo with decades of custom paint experience between them.
"Our business is strictly word of mouth," says Mitch Kelly. "The customers see our name on the work, and that brings them in."
Mitch is carrying on a family legacy that began at the turn of the century. His great-grandfather started pin striping in the early days of the automobile (first for Studebaker, then for Ford), and his father, Tom Kelly, is a legend in the business. The elder Kelly began his career in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, ground zero for the modern custom culture and worked with the legendary Von Dutch and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.Mitch got his start painting wheels on conversion vans during the 1970s, working alongside his father. Since then he's established his own reputation in the custom world, raising the shop's profile even higher.
There was never any question that he'd follow in his father's footsteps. "My junior year in high school I was working at a cabinet shop for six hours after school and four hours at the paint shop," Kelly says. "I realized I was making more money in four hours at the paint shop than I was at the cabinet shop. After my senior year it was non-stop."
Tom Kelly (who was in Norway teaching an airbrush class this fall) is still actively involved in the shop at age 70, and the father-and-son team paint side by side. "He's still very talented, very steady and does really great work," the younger Kelly says. "I go to him for inspiration on all the art. He's the one we go to for color choices, and we ask his opinion on what has to be done to make sure the job is done right. The raw talent here is my dad. He's got all my talent in his thumb."
The family business
As a custom shop, Kelly & Son relies on its reputation to keep business flowing. "We've been doing that for 30 years," Kelly says. "We also get a lot of repeat customers."Treating customers well keeps them coming back, but Kelly says you have to be respectful even when turning down a job – which he periodically has to do. Running a successful custom shop requires working closely with the customer, not just on the creative side of the project, but also on the financial side.
Custom paint jobs can take hundreds of hours and cost as much as $10,000 to $12,000 or more, depending on the project. The specialized paints used by custom shops can cost hundreds of dollars per quart.
"You can tell when they pull into the driveway if they have the money," Kelly says. "If they just want a quick paint job, they're in the wrong place. I try to be tactful and let them know where they can get the work done within their price range. But if somebody wants to come in here and spend money, we can accommodate them. We ask them what they have to spend and we try to work with them. My father always told me not to shy away from work. A $500 job can bring you a $5,000 job down the line. If you bring me a bowling ball, I'll paint it."Unlike a traditional collision shop, Kelly prices his work on a project basis instead of breaking out all of the line-item costs (paint, materials, labor, etc.) "If it's a race car that's full of holes we have to fix, we'll figure out an hourly rate for the regular body work, but we really tailor our work to what the customer needs and can afford," he says. "We look at the job as a whole."
As for equipment, Kelly uses a much wider variety of spray guns than a standard shop would have on hand, including equipment for airbrushing, fine lines, fading and other effects. Kelly also has pressure pots for the tractor trailers he paints (two for clearcoat, two for basecoat and two spares).
"Basically you'll see stuff in here that we need for custom work," Kelly says. "We have a welder and we do metal fabrication. You won't find a frame machine in here."
Speaking of those semi trucks, the one unique feature about Kelly's shop you'd notice right off the bat would be the mammoth 63' x 19' x 19' paint booth, in which Kelly is able to paint tractor-trailer rigs for corporate clients and motocross and supercross teams.Kelly began painting tractor trailers 18 years ago when a beach volleyball association hired the shop to paint a 30-foot volleyball player on the side of a truck.
"This was in the days before vinyl," he says. "We would lay these semis out in the street with an overhead projector and sketch everything out. It took forever." He's since painted trucks for Suzuki, Kawasaki and Honda, among other clients. Unlike his custom car work, Kelly actively searches for tractor trailer customers, contacting individual race teams to offer his services.
"We can put a semi in the booth, and put two scissor lifts in there next to it and have room to walk around," Kelly says. "We did three SEMA show jobs in there, end-to-end."
Custom Camaro
At NACE this year, the ABRN booth will feature a 2010 Camaro that's been given the signature Kelly touch. Owner Walter Dominguez has been a customer of The Crazy Painters for about 15 years, and has had about a half dozen cars painted at the shop in that time.
He loves orange, so Mitch Kelly developed a special orange pearl waterborne paint at the paint manufacturer's training center just for this project. Kelly also added some racing strips and hand-painted emblems, and painted some of the interior pieces and the exterior molding.
"Walter wanted traditional racing stripes, and we did that with a ghost of the orange pearl," Kelly says. "We also have two multi-color fades, from the roofline to the bodyline, and then on the lower part of the car."
"That 2010 Camaro is just beautiful, so to try and make it look better would be ridiculous," Kelly adds. "What we did was just complement the elements already in the car."
In addition to the paint job, Kelly cut the fenders by an inch and three-quarters and opened up the back end of the car to accommodate larger tires (from Lexani). He also painted the new Asanti wheels orange to match the car. Dominguez, who owns Dream Workz Audio in Gardena, Calif., also had the interior redone and added new JL Audio woofers and amps to the audio system.
Business basics
In addition to Tom and Mitch, there are only a handful of other employees in the shop. He picks his helpers based on their work ethic and their ability to learn. "If people come by that want to work I try to size them up," Kelly says. "I'll use them for a bit and see if they fit in."
Kelly keeps up with new paint technology the same way everyone else does: he attends all of the training classes. "I've been doing that for 30 years," he says. "I have to learn about the new products and sealers and primers. There have been so many changes over the years. I don't take it for granted that I'll know what I'm doing with the new material."
Like other body shops in California, Kelly & Sons also has been impacted by pending environmental requirements. Kelly is slowly making the transition to waterborne paint, working closely with his paint vendor to develop customer waterborne colors.
"We've done several custom paint jobs in waterborne," Kelly says. "The best thing about it is the smell. It doesn't stink and it doesn't give you a headache. I was worried about it initially, but now it's getting to be fun."
"The stuff dries really fast," he adds. "I did three colors on a Mazda race car with multiple layers. We got the whole thing finished and clearcoated in one day with waterborne."
While there have been a lot of changes in the business over the years, the key to Kelly & Son's success has remained the Kellys' creativity and dedication to their work.
"Dad's been doing this since he was a kid, and he still does great work," Mitch Kelly says. "We just worked on a dragster he lettered back in 1967. They've rebuilt the car and now his son gets to paint it and he gets to letter it. Even when the work is tough I enjoy doing it."
