Market for premium car care products?

[yebo]

the problem with a niche market is there are so few of them that you need to mark up your product a lot to be able to recoup your investment. there are more people who go to the neighborhood car wash than people who really wash their own cars. and there are much much more car owners who only have their cars waxed once or twice when it was new than those that wax their cars regularly. after the new car smell is gone joy dishwashing liquid na gamit nila. so yeah madami kotse sa metro manila, pero tignan mo pumapasok sa mga car accessories shop kung ano tinitignan, mostly car perfume and floor mats. yung section ng car detailing halos walang tao.

[jhnkvn]

Kumusta fellow Tsikot car enthusiasts!

I am planning on distributing premium car care products in the Philippines but would like to ask for your help in determining a few unknowns such as brand familiarity and demand.

I know for sure that most car enthusiasts there are familiar with the likes of Meguiars but trust me, there are a lot of other less-known brands that surpass Meguiars' quality. Here's a small sampling of the brands I'm hoping to bring over there:

Klasse
Blackfire
Dodo Juice
Duragloss
Souveran
Chemical Guys
Sonus

...and more.

You can freely search for these products online, application, results, etc. Let me know if you would be interested in having local access to these items.

Maraming Salamat!

-normandelli-

As an entrepreneur myself, I usually do not warn people against doing what they like. In this case, however, I'll be raising a flag.

We all know that there is not much market for premium car care products. It is, however, too small to have proper economies of scale that even I won't try to penetrate the market. If you want a good metric, check out the amount of waxed cars out while you're stuck in rush hour in EDSA, and I assure you the realization is daunting.

Carlack/Klasse is already being distributed by Dexterton while Dodo Juice is circulated by Waxnerd in limited quantities (parang <20 pots per month or something). Chemical Guy is also already distributed.. I believe there's a thread here that tackles that along with the quoted pricelist. Two of the products you missed that I love are Menzerna and Finish Kare.

Sure, bigger quantities will net you more discount. However, your problem now is how much? Meguiars are expensive here is because they're including taxation into the list, once you get "quantity", it's harder to duck under the radar of the BOC and BIR. They don't order by-crates, they order by-the-container with the amount of distributor partners they have locally.

If you want to have a chance at this, this won't simply be an easy job if you aren't well-capitalized. Premium always has a market but reaching out to premiums is expensive. You'll be doing a lot of marketing, a lot of advertisements, and trade shows as so to sway people's perception of your product. You will need to train and partner with detailing shops like how Meguiar does it. They do it is because it's what you call in business as stickiness or switching costs. You don't sell a product, you sell the experience. In this case, whenever a newbile detailer wants to open a detailing shop.. who do you think they'll approach? Meguiars. Not because they're the biggest detailing distributor locally but because they offer you training. That's why you see their banners all over the place.

Or you choose the other route -- start with less premium products and dish them out en-masse. Look at Charles' Microtex for example.

[jhnkvn]

Oh, and a lot of detailing product results are merely placebo.

If they truly are "better", then if I display two well-prepped vehicles one with Meguiar's Yellow Wax while the other is Souveran Pinnacle Paste Wax. Do you highly believe you can pick which is which with an accuracy of more than 80%?

Hell, even I can't tell which product you use if all I see is beading and sheeting. Malay ko ba if you used Mothers, Meguiars, Autoglym, etc.

Want to start promoting a product? Start educating people and start finding exotic cars which you can use as promotional cars