Mechanix Wear at the right place, right time from start

Back in 1992, there wasn't much in the way of equipment for NASCAR pit crews that wasn't already used somewhere else.

A dedicated bunch of motocross racers, led by Jim Hale, stepped in and changed the face of the game, and the company has spun that early success into the lion's share of the NASCAR market.

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"When we first got to NASCAR, we saw pit crews wearing batting gloves from baseball to change tires and using kneepads from volleyball," said Ted Abdon, head of the motorsports division for Mechanix Wear. "Essentially, we were a motocross apparel company, and one of the riders that we sponsored in motocross, his mechanic asked us to make a set of gloves to work on the motorcycle with. At the time, we were using a lot of state-of-the-art, high-tech materials to make gloves for riders, so we automatically used those materials to make the mechanic's gloves.

"After working with this gentleman [Brian Lunniss] -- who is now the head of our R&D department -- and some friends of his, we made the initial production run, which I think was 200 pair. We took them to the Daytona 500 in 1992, and at that time they said, 'Oh, these gloves are awesome.' They ran through the initial run in a couple of hours, and everybody loved them. We had to get more for the next week. That's kind of where it started."

One of the first teams to get into Mechanix Wear products was Richard Childress Racing, specifically the No. 3 team of driver Dale Earnhardt for the 1992 Daytona 500. Roger Penske's IndyCar team was another early devotee, and that was a big part of the early success of the new product.

"When the most respected teams in the business started putting their hands in our gloves, everyone else in racing took notice," said Bari Waalk, Mechanix Wear's marketing director. "Once the word got out in the garage that there was a glove designed specifically for mechanics, other teams quickly began calling."

As so often happens in NASCAR racing, the Mechanix Wear folks were in the right place at the right time with the right product, and the result has been phenomenal.

Abdon said that on a given NASCAR weekend, there are "400 to 600" crew members wearing Mechanix Wear products to do their jobs.

"We really knew nothing about pit stops and stock cars and oval racing; we were all from the motocross world," Abdon said. "Everything we developed was from direct input from the crews. We didn't have a preconceived notion of how things should be. They just said, 'This is what we need.'"

Waalk said that once the product took off in motorsports, the next logical step was to take it mainstream to "anyone with a tool box."

"As we saw the product and its usefulness in other forms of motorsports, we started to realize that there was opportunity beyond motorsports itself," Waalk said. "Creating demand inside motorsports was easy; it was taking that use of the product outside of racing to that everyday guy when it became challenging.

"The most sensible way to do that was to use our association with motorsports for credibility and then build credibility for the whole product category and set ourselves up as the leader in the category. Then we sold our specific product."

Now, Mechanix Wear offers 38 different types of gloves for use in dozens of disciplines, from the core automotive high-performance gloves to tradesmen, construction workers, emergency services personnel, law enforcement and military.

It all started with that initial run of gloves for NASCAR teams at the 1992 Daytona 500. Now, one would be hard-pressed to avoid seeing the Mechanix Wear logo in the garage area at a NASCAR race.

The key, according to Waalk and Abdon, is the constant changes the company makes in its gloves. Abdon said that the initial 2008 product has already been improved at least twice since the beginning of the season. With a largely volunteer R&D department in the motorsports crewmen the product was designed to serve, that's easy to imagine.

The entry into mainstream marketing was somewhat harder. Waalk said that the initial foray into getting Mechanix Wear products into endemic chains like NAPA, AutoZone and others didn't go well, primarily because the product was not defined outside racing.

It took a while, but now Mechanix Wear products are sold at most major automotive and home-improvement retailers.

"Now, it looks like we had this master plan back in 1991, and we'd like to say that we were that smart," Waalk said. "We weren't. A lot of companies use racing to market their brand and it's just one of the many things that they do. For us, it's actually who we are and why we do what we do. Racing runs deep in the culture and core of our business, but at the same time, the usefulness of our product could never have been communicated without racing.

"From a business standpoint, we've been successful building a new product category and a brand, but we all are still racers at heart."