It’s
probably a sign of my advancing years, but when I was asked to write an article
for Hub Pages by my customer at Cars One
Love, I had never even heard of car dipping, let alone did I know anything
about it. When I started to research the topic, though, I thought, Wow! I wish
I’d known about his when I was young and trying to make my second hand Datsun
look cool! It turns out that car dipping is a way that you can paint a car in
any colour and, if you change your mind about it, you can just peel off the
paint and start all over again with another colour.
It’s no
wonder, then, that car dipping has become so popular and it all started with a
DIY product called Plasti Dip that a guy in America invented to coat the handles
of garden tools and wrenches. Here’s what I learned about car dipping and the product
Plasti Dip.
Where it all began
Plasti Dip
was invented by a guy called Robert Haasl, who owned and ran a small Plastisol manufacturing
company in the small city of Blaine, Minnesota, USA. The company was making heat
cured PVC products such as toys and handle grips. Robert Haasl was convinced that
here was a market for a version of Plastisol that would dry in the air that
could be sold to home DIY enthusiasts and he came up with the idea Plasti Dip.
Haasl didn’t
have a lot of luck selling his invention at first and the big DIY retailers
weren’t interested in it at all. So, the company struggled on, and Robert Haasl
spent hour after hour waiting in the reception areas of American DIY retail
giants like Ace Hardware and Sears, hoping to get a chance to make a pitch for
his product.
The accidental invention of car dipping
Meanwhile, legend
has it, that a car enthusiast in Florida named Joe Plesher was searching through
his garage trying to find something that he could paint his car wheels black
with and all he could find was a can of black Plasti Dip
that his brother had
left lying around, so he gave that a go.
Plesher was
so impressed by the results of his experiment, he immediately went out and bought
all the cans of Plasti Dip he could find and he started experimenting with it
on other parts of his car. Joe Plesher then started to share his DIY car
dipping experiments via YouTube videos, and the car dipping craze was born.
The car
dipping craze then went viral and, three and half years after Joe Plesher first
sprayed his rims black with Plasti Dip, his car dipping tutorials have received
over 60 million views on YouTube and his website DipYourCar has become a major reseller of
the Plasti Dip product.
Car Dipping and Plasti Dip
Sadly, Robert
Haasl died before the car dipping craze took off, but his son, Scott, who now runs
the Plasti Dip Company, initially had no idea why his father’s product that
Scott has called “plastic gloop” had suddenly started to sell so well. When Joe
Plesher’s videos first started to take off, sales of Plasti Dip
jumped suddenly
from just 20,000 cans a month to more than a million a month and, today, Plasti
Dip is an internationally recognised brand.
It just goes
to show what social media can do for a business and that if you think you have
a good idea, you should never give up. I don’t think that Robert Haasl would
have been too upset that his plastic gloop is now being used on cars and not on
the handles of garden tools as he had intended.
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This is an abridged
version of an article first published on Hub Pages: Plasti
Dip – The Amazing Story Behind Car and Rim Dipping.
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