A car enthusiast turns a catalogue into a company.

Griot’s Garage — the name is pronounced roughly “gree-oh”, English Wikipedia says — is an American maker and seller of car-care products, detailing tools and garage equipment. It takes its name from its founder, Richard Griot, and began as a mail-order catalogue in 1990. English Wikipedia places the founding in Southern California, citing a 2003 profile of Griot in The New York Times.

Autoweek told the founder’s story in a profile by Roger Hart published on 18 May 2008. Griot grew up in the Los Angeles area three doors from Adam West, the actor who played Batman on television in the 1960s, and the magazine describes a drive in West’s Ferrari 308GT4 as the moment Griot decided that cars would be his life. Before the business, Autoweek says, Griot had worked as a mechanic for the Jim Russell racing school and as a clothing designer and maker; he left the clothing trade after a competitor copied one of his designs.

The catalogue idea came from his father, who ran an optical sales catalogue and told him that a catalogue business does not depend on its region, according to the same article. Griot concluded that while many firms sold tools, waxes and detailing equipment, none had tied them together as a lifestyle. Before launching he tested the idea by leaving fliers on the windshields of cars parked in the spectator lots at Laguna Seca during the Monterey Historic Automobile Races, and his first catalogue was patterned on the one produced by the clothing company Patagonia. The business launched as the first Gulf War began, Autoweek notes.

The company’s slogan, “Have fun in your garage”, has been used since the launch, the magazine says. In a message on the company website, Griot says he started what would become Griot’s Garage in his home garage in 1988 and “really stepped up” in 1990, when he introduced the first catalogue along with a padded lay-down creeper, a floor paint, car-care products and tools. The company’s heritage page says it was the creeper that “got the upstart business rolling”.

From creepers to polishers and microfibre.

Car care became the core of the range. On its heritage page the company says it introduced its first six-inch random orbital polisher in 1992, and that a spray-on detailer it now sells as Speed Shine was launched in 1994 under the name Fast Shine. Later polishers carry short model codes: the company says its long-throw BOSS G15 and G21 machines arrived in 2015, the G9 orbital and the smaller G8 Mini in 2019, and redesigned versions of the G15 and G21 in 2020.

Microfibre towels are another strand. The company says it developed its PFM microfibre in 2015 and that the initials began as Richard Griot’s own nickname for the product during development, “Pure Freakin’ Magic”, which then stuck as the name.

The catalogue was a personal project. Autoweek reported in 2008 that Griot wrote the catalogue himself and acted as the final judge of what it carried, quoting him as saying that if he did not like or use a product, he would not sell it. The magazine described a range that ran from power tools and hand tools to floor paints and car waxes. English Wikipedia describes the early catalogue as one that mixed products with automotive commentary, and says it grew over time to include more maintenance tools, polishes and accessories.

The company also adopted a broad guarantee early on. In his website message, Griot says that from the beginning the company offered a lifetime guarantee on everything it sold, and the site today carries the line “100% guaranteed. Customers for life”. He also says he decided early that Griot’s Garage would make its own car-care products, from development through to bottling and distribution.

English Wikipedia lists the company as privately held. It says the headquarters later moved to Tacoma, Washington, and that as sales grew the company set up a distribution facility in Plainfield, Indiana, in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, citing a 2014 photo gallery in The Indianapolis Star. Autoweek in 2008 already described the company’s headquarters as being in Tacoma, with a facility in the Indianapolis area handling manufacturing and shipping of its car-care products.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make things people put on, or in, their cars: waxes and polishes, cleaners and detailing products, treatments for glass, and accessories such as floor liners. Car-care and auto-accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger industrial or consumer-goods groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a petrol-station shelf to a specialist detailing shop.

A car-care brand’s identity is usually carried by a bottle, a label, a colour or a name rather than by the product itself, because what is inside the bottle is rarely seen. The company behind the name may also have changed hands, moved its production or licensed the name to others along the way. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where it makes its products and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Tacoma for the shop, Plainfield for the bottles.

On where its products are made, the company is specific about its liquids. Its manufacturing page says Griot’s Garage liquid car care is “developed, mixed, bottled, labeled, and shipped” from Plainfield, Indiana, and describes the site as its own U.S. manufacturing and distribution centre.

Tacoma is the public face of the brand. The company’s website describes its corporate headquarters and flagship retail store there as a restored property that also houses an auto display; it says many of the cars photographed for its catalogue covers later appear in that display, and that the line-up often matches the theme of Caffeine & Gasoline, a cruise-in car show it holds on the first Saturday of each month. The same page advertises a free Car Care School in which staff demonstrate paint care, interior detailing and wheel and tyre cleaning on visitors’ own vehicles.

The founder’s name and voice run through the brand. The company is named after Richard Griot, a message signed by him sits in the about section of its website, and Autoweek summed up the notion he lives by in 2008: that people have precious free time, and if they choose to spend it in the garage doing something they love, they should do it.

For a design guide, Griot’s Garage shows how a founder-led catalogue can turn one enthusiast’s taste into a brand, with a slogan, a named range and a physical store reinforcing the same idea. Compare Meguiar’s, another American car-care name, and Rain-X, another car-care brand. For this guide we use a deep red, slate and concrete grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Griot’s Garage’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.