After way too many months of having the “pull to inflate” stickers on the site WITHOUT a picture I found about 10 minutes when the phone was not ringing to shoot them and add them to the site. Check them out:

and

For some reason, not having a picture had not stopped people from buying it, which is quite odd. Sorry for making everyone wait this long. The good news is that out of the 200 something sold we have NOT had one complaint about the design, scale, color, quality or anything!

Fill those ugly holes in your door panel of your MINI Cooper with these Door Insert Caps in both Union Jack and Checkered flag. Now available at OutMotoring.com.

They are the perfect way to cover up those unsightly holes around the perimeter of your MINI’s oval shaped interior door panel….did I mention they ship for free via USPS?

If you’re in need of a cool keychain for your MINI Cooper Key, check out these new designs that I designed…

This one is called the “punchout“:

and this is called …..you’ll never guess:

I have a thing for chairs. I don’t dare count how many I have in my house because it’s overwhelming. While I have the normal dining chairs and such I have a collection of ‘design’ chairs that are somewhere between sculpture and art. I use them around the house but most people look at them as more of decoration than a useful object. One of my favorites is by a designer named Konstantin Grcic. The ChairONE is one of the coolest chairs I have ever laid eyes. Most may not share my opinion…I like because it looks so much like the Stealth Bomber with the planar surfaces that look uncomfortable to sit on yet in reality is quite comfortable….

One of my other favorites is this Eames LCW (I have it Walnut):

Somehow I manage to keep growing my chair collection even though I don’t recall ever having enough people in the house to actually utilize them….my wife thinks they may need to end up at the office which would not be the end of the world…..

I can’t believe I only have a handful of days to get ready for the Tail of the Dragon event the first week in May….it is quite a lot of work to get prepped. Point of purchase displays, lighting, signage, transportation, setup, running the booth, bringing the product, food, etc. etc….

I wish I could just run a virtual store down there and have everything magically appear in the customers hands so I could hang out more and get to know the people that have supported us over the last 5 years. That is my main purpose for going down to the event but everyone really enjoys having us there and love to check out the products we bring. It is the only event we do each year but may consider doing AMVIV (Biggest West Coast event held in Vegas) at some point, but it is quite a lot more work to get everything to Vegas vs driving 7 hours down to Tennessee from our location in Ohio. When we relocate to Charlotte (as soon as our house sells) we will be just a short drive from Fontana Village and it will that much easier to do the event. As of now, my wife and our 3 kids will be heading down for the 4 day event and have her parents watching the kids at our cabin which makes it a lot more enjoyable. Our kids love going down to the event and with both our families being in Knoxville, it is an easy trip for them to pop over and visit us while we’re down there.

I did not know what to think when Alta released the latest version of some of their exhaust systems and intercoolers in the matte black finish which they have tagged as “stealth”. It seems to be pretty cool but it also looks a bit unfinished with the matte finish and all but it also has this sort of mean, raw look to it that is pretty hip. Trendy, maybe. A fad? Most likely. But hey, it looks nice under the right circumstances so I decided to start selling it as an option to the polished finish that Alta also makes.

Over the last few months I have designed a few tshirts that seem to be VERY popular. So much so I find myself running over to the local screenprinters shop to drop off a load of t-shirts about once a week and with it comes a bill for printing shirts and the hassle of the minimum order requirements, 1 week order prep time and all that. So, I thought I would try to bring that process in-house and bought a Heat Transfer press (on ebay for super cheap) and will start doing shirts in lower quantities so we can offer more designs. I would rather have 10 designs and have 3 of each size in stock than 3 designs and 10 of each size sitting in stock if you know what I mean. It’s a basic retailing concept called Wide and Shallow VS Shallow and Deep…I have typically preferred to run a Wide and Shallow especially with how quickly I can generally get restocked on the things we sell (in most cases 1-5 days on any given item). There are a few items that I stock hundreds and hundreds and some I stock dozens and dozens while others maybe 1-2 at a time….so anyways, having the capability to prints shirts at will and keep a few in backstock will be nice.

To top it off the owner of the company a few doors down that does nearly all of the label and decorative application sourcing for Victorias Secret, Abercrombie, Under Armour and a few other major retailers that are headquartered within a few miles of the OutMotoring World HQ is a good friend. Chris also happens to have patents on some of the most widely used innovative screen printing techniques and is a all around good guy who has all the connections one could image with Chinese printers, label makers, etc. So, he is the one that helps get our OutMotoring keychains made for us at a extremely good cost and is also helping get heat transfers printed. This will allow us me to design and offer about 6-10 new shirts and print them as needed and keep our inventory investment down while offering new and fresh designs.

And no, that shirt in the heat press below will not be one of the new ‘fresh’ designs…

I was thinking about how much money I pay the local sign shop to do stuff like make our hood stripes and stickers and the thought came to me to just start doing it in-house so I don’t have to wait 3-5 days for new stripes when I’m out of stock. Plus, we have added so many new stickers and other stuff that I thought it would be nice to have a vinyl cutter. So, I found a great deal on Craigslist and went to buy it this evening with my kids and wife in our trusty Mazda MINI van. It’s a pretty cool plotter style cutter that I hope will be put to good use. You gotta love Craigslist. This thing was a steal and came with a computer (running cough, cough, windows 95) but has the print software as part of the CorelDraw software that is loaded onto it well. I figure it will be paid for in about 3 months of hood stripes that we typically sell.

I just can’t seem to get enough of the Griots Garage products. Every couple weeks I find something that I want to start offering to our customers. So I buy a few and see how they do and of course they sell. The latest additions from this week are the revised 3″ Professional Polisher and the Bumper and Trim Reconditioner. The Bumper and Trim Reconditioner is the BEST product that I know of to get the lower plastic trim on the MINI Cooper that rich silky black. There are a few other products on the market, but they mostly make the trim look like greasy cheap popcorn from the movie theater. Do yourself a favor and pick some of this stuff up.

James Bedford was the first person to be Cryogenically frozen in Jan 1967. I have no idea who he was but it the first thing that popped up when I searched “cryogenic frozen people” after searching the same thing but for ‘celebrities’ returned some garbage about Walt Disney and Lucie Lou. So, the first freezing of a humas was over 40 years ago, and now look what we’re doing with the technology; freezing perfectly good rotors so they perform even better. Who thought of this? I had nothing to do with it.

While freezing people sounds quite silly and to be quite honest freezing brake rotors sounds even more silly (or is the other way around?) at least we gain something from freezing rotors. These rotors, in fact, offer a nice benefit over standard replacement rotors in that they last longer and offer other technical advantages. Check out the new Cryogenically frozen rotors for the MINI Cooper over at Outmotoring.com.