Traditionally, trucks were built for one thing: to haul stuff. Strictly utilitarian, they were blank slates to be customized to the customer’s needs. But when “sport” was added to “utility,” the truck aftermarket blossomed into a huge resource for retailers to also personalize vehicles based on taste.
Jeff Jones, owner of Truck Toys & More, has tapped into this promising market, and catering to installation has proved a valuable service to customers, especially since installation of truck accessories has become easier.
After 20 years in the restaurant business, Jones founded the company in 1996 after a friend went to North Carolina to have a Rhino Lining sprayed into the bed of his truck. “[He] came back saying that this was what I ought to get into,” Jones relates. “I made a phone call and boom — next thing you know I’m spraying Rhinos.” He didn’t even own a truck at that point, but his timing was perfect; the truck aftermarket was starting to swing into top gear, and with only one other truck retailer in town, Jones saw plenty of opportunity.
“As the market kept growing and we got more and more trucks, we decided to add more accessories,” Jones says. “We saw more market for hitches, goosenecks, camper covers, camper tops, wheels and tires, lifted trucks, diesel performance — we just keep adding. I think that diesel performance is now one of our bigger items besides the Rhino Linings and truck caps. It seems to be a growing line of products.”
The products themselves have also gotten easier to install over the years, increasing profit margins. “Ten years ago we had to do a lot of drilling and mounting,” Jones recalls. “Since it took longer, you had to inflate the price to cover that. Now the manufacturers have made everything bolt-on with greater ease of installation, so we can sell the product at a lesser price.”
Yet most of his customers still wanted Truck Toys to install the products for them, so Jones needed more work space. In February 2003, Jones moved into a new 15,000-sq.-foot facility on land he bought and developed in a growing section of town. “The traffic count going past the store is up to 55,000 cars a day,” Jones points out. “We came into the area as we saw it starting to grow, wanting something that had a high traffic count and was near a red light.”
The 9,400 sq. feet of space out back are service bays which house, among other things, a four-post and two-post lift, a digital plotter, which cuts window film for tinting and a tire changer and wheel balancer. This leaves 3,600 sq. feet up front for Jones’ centerpiece, the showroom.
“People like to see and touch the product,” he asserts. “If you bought a brand new Chevy today, we should have everything here to fit it: tool boxes, brush guards, mud flaps, step bars, Rhino Linings, hitches, goosenecks, fifth wheels…We buy through Keystone Automotive, and on their computer network, eKeystone.com, they have a list of the top 100 items being sold in the truck accessory business, so we at least try to keep those items in stock at all times.”
Jones also pays attention to how the items are displayed. “We’ve always said that when people come into a facility, you should make them walk around something so that they have to look at stuff without making a beeline for the counter. That was the idea for putting the sales counter in the back.”
In February 2005, Jones opened a second store in Kingsport, about 30 miles north, with plans for a third in another nearby town. In the meantime, he’s wrestling with the whims of dealer sales. “I think the biggest thing is customer service,” he has concluded. “We try to go above and beyond to take care of every customer that comes through the door and not have someone leave without at least having their questions answered.”
Jones has also launched an aggressive television campaign on local cable networks. In December alone they ran their commercial 800 times in all areas of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia. A seasonal promotion, it offers a $50 discount on a bed liner for the rest of the month, as well as giving away $1,200 worth of accessories. On the product front, Jones noted at the last Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) convention that lift kits appear to be making a comeback.
“We’re starting to gear up for this,” he explains. “It might be a couple of years away from hitting the East Coast, but in the meantime I try to keep the latest products for the newest trucks,” which includes diesel performance, a market with huge potential because of rising fuel costs. Increased efficiency is now easily obtained with new programmable chips, most of which Jones keeps in stock. And bio-diesel, an environmentally-friendly fuel derived from soy beans, is being researched by Jones’ staff.
“We’d like to be more involved in the diesel market,” he emphasizes. “We don’t know where bio-diesel is leading to right now, but we’re always trying to learn more about it and, if this is a market that’s available to us, take it to the next level.”
The store has also gone online at trucktoysandmore.com, which serves more as a research tool for the consumer: “We do have a lot of people who come in here who’ve found products either in a magazine or on the Internet, then they come here to purchase it,” Jones explains. “Sometimes we’re having to match Internet prices. But they buy the product from us because we can do the install.”
This business leader seems to have set the stage in his market, forcing others to try to keep up with the Jones’.
The Vital Stats
Years in business: 10
Growth plans: Truck Toys & More plans to add a third store in the local market.
Number of employees: Seven at both stores
Wholesale/retail ratio: 5/95
Snapshot of Truck Toys & More: It started in 1996 as a spray-in truck bed franchise and quickly branched into the bolt-on aftermarket.
Competition: Doozy Truck Covers, Leonard Truck Accessories
Facility size: The Jonesborough store is 15,000 sq. feet; the Kingsport store
is 5,500 sq. feet.
