.

the car junkie daily magazine.

.

II Much: How An Innovative Solution On A Project Car Turned Into An Aftermarket Company


II Much: How An Innovative Solution On A Project Car Turned Into An Aftermarket Company

The things we bolt, weld, clamp, and epoxy onto our cars and trucks all started as an idea. We take that for granted now but it is the truth. Nothing you have ever used when building your hot rod sprang forth from the Earth on its own. Lots of this stuff was schemed up and built ages ago. Items like an Edelbrock Performer intake for a small block Chevy were designed and created decades ago and were so good that they have withstood the every shifting sands of time. Meanwhile, new stuff gets created, refined, and introduced still today. Look at our New Products page for proof of that and look at II Much as more of the same. See, that company came to life after two guys who were working on a project car decided to try and solve a problem that no one else had a good plan for. Their solution was good enough, robust enough, and effective enough that the guys thought others may want to give it a shot. More than 10 years after those initial parts were made, one of the pair is working full time and continuing to innovate new products today. If you thought all the “garage inventors” had left the hot rodding business you’d be dead wrong.

If you didn’t know, II Much makes fuel tank vents that are designed for everything from tame street cars to full on competition race cars. These vents are designed to prevent fuel from sloshing out of the tank and they are designed to properly vent the tank while not leaving your car, truck, garage, or ware-home smelling like a pool of gasoline. It sounds really simple. It sounds like something that someone should have come up with a long time ago, but the reality is that even today most people are using a coil of tubing or some other hill-jack type solution to vent their tank. For John Ulaszek and John Parsons, the co-founders of the company and a pair of engineers, it was not acceptable to have a high end pro touring car that they busted their asses on smell like it had fuel leeching out of its pores so they put their minds to it and came up with a way to fix the problem.

Picture 3Their vent uses sound engineering principles, an eye toward a pleasing design, and a concentration on quality construction to not only prevent the smells and sloshing they were trying to prevent but also to stand alone as a component you’d be proud to have on your car. “When we set out to fix this problem we wanted to do something clean sheet that would be a compelling design,” company co-founder John Ulaszek said. “We were also doing this (at first) as a singular effort on John’s car. It was after we came up with the final design and people saw and heard about it that we decided to sell some through ProTouring.com. The initial product run was for 50 pieces and we sold them all. At that point we thought that we may have had a product we could build a business on.”

BUT…building a business these days takes loads of money, backing, a staff, flashy marketing, and bells and whistles a couple of guys with day jobs could never afford, right? Wrong again. “We literally came to market with no resources outside of ourselves,” Ulaszek said. “We had no debt, we were working on good terms with the local machine shop that was making our parts, and that first run of 50 vents was a big deal for us.”

It wasn’t exactly a highway to riches from that point but the fact that they sold 50 pieces and had 50 satisfied people validated their design and got the attention of larger entities within the aftermarket. Companies like Detroit Speed, the Ring Brothers, and others now stock the II Much vents and they only do that because they’ve personally validated the product. Aeromotive recommends people use II Much vents when their customers ask and when a dude like Mark Stielow decides that your stuff is up to snuff on his projects, you know that the parts themselves are both effective and aesthetically pleasing.

As we mentioned, for the majority of the company’s formative time both John Ulaszek and company co-founder John Parsons were working full time jobs along with II Much and as is always the case in partnerships, each man’s perspective and situation was different. Ultimately these differences in perspective and goals led the two guys to an amicable split. “We kept our friendship ahead of the business,” John told us. “Because of that, there came a time when Parsons was working hard at his day job, working assembling vents and shipping them, and having little time to do much else in his life and he called me one day and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ and we figured out how to separate.” Parsons is still building pro touring cars and the two men remain friends.

Manufacturing things is an adventurous business. Physically making and selling stuff has been part of the social landscape for thousands of year of human life but it really hasn’t gotten a lot easier over the years. The basic interaction is still the same. A person decides they have a problem, they seek the best solution to the problem, and if you have the best one that fits their needs, they give you money. As an engineer, Ulaszek has an understanding of the hows and whys of the process but even he defers to a higher power on some basic Picture 4elements of his business. John’s a devotee of the principles and practices championed by W. Edwards Deming. These ideas and practices were adopted most robustly by the Japanese automotive industry in the 1970s and they propelled that faction of the world into a powerhouse in a very short time. Thankfully, American industry came around to Deming’s teachings and ideas when they were on the ropes and the results have been visible ever since. “II Much has a clear system, clear goals for our output, and a clear aim,” Ulaszek said. “There’s a romantic notion out there that you can have a business where you work a few hours a week and peek in on things now and again and you’ll be successful. That’s the idea of a “lifestyle” company or basically an income stream that supports your lifestyle on its own. That’s not a feasible thing. I want to make great parts and solve people’s problems and to do that consistently requires a lot of work as any small business person would tell you.”

So what’s the big challenge in selling fuel vents? As you’d expect one of the first is education people as to why they need it and why it is superior to coiling up some hose as has been done for decades. “One of the things to think about is competition,” John said. “In reality, you have to show someone why this product is more worth their money today than that short throw shifter they were thinking of or why they should scrimp on their grocery bill to have the cash to buy my stuff. It really is an amazing thing when you consider the size of the entire aftermarket and the fact that we’re all selling things that are not need products. We’re operating in a “want” world and people’s passion and their own personal drive are the two things that business owners in this marketplace depend on.” He continued, “There is no better feeling in the world when someone calls you and wants to buy a thing that you make. It literally gets no better than that.”

If a high performance fuel vent seems like a random product to stake your claim on, you have obviously not attended SEMA. There are thousands of booths there hawking products that would make your eyes roll into the back of your head if you actually spend time considering them. John and John both discovered an opening in a tight industry and wisely they went for it.

John Ulaszek now operates II Much as a one man band and he’s busier than ever. As you saw here on BangShift just yesterday, he has launched another innovative, problem solving product to the II Much product line. This time it is a very interesting bulkhead fitting air1that he is calling the Airport. This piece is designed to aid in the installation of Vintage Air A/C systems by cleaning up the hose routing through the firewall and allowing the end user to really plan out where they are sending those lines through on their own application. The design of the product is something that John took lots of time on and had a great back and forth relationship with Vintage Air on. “I had talked with the guys at Vintage Air about ideas that they had on installation products that could help the end user and the bulkhead fitting came up more than once,” Ulaszek said. “I wanted to create a solution rather than something that would fall in place with other existing options out there. The Airport bulkhead fitting is something that I am proud of because it helps everyone from top builders to guys in their garage get a very clean look and a professional looking level of finish on their Vintage Air hose routing. It is exciting to grow the product line like this and do it in a way that stays true to the vision I have had for II Much since we started. Creating these products and solutions and addressing needs no one has is really satisfying.”

Innovation in the aftermarket and high performance industry is no dead, it is not limited to the big companies with the big budgets, it is happening in garages and some of those garage ideas will launch empires. Others may fade into the vapor of history but there will be long lasting and useful things developed by dedicated hot rodders with really humble beginnings. We’re starting to think more and more than II Much products will be on that high shelf.

We love this story because it is one of innovation, hard work, and success. You should follow II Much on Facebook and keep up with their latest projects and fun. Support your local speed parts manufacturer!

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE II MUCH FB PAGE AND GIVE THEM A LIKE!

Picture 2

IImuch

 

 


  • Share This
  • Pinterest
  • 0