The touch up process at my reconditioning center was a mess.

Robert Keppel: Founder, Applied Colors

I founded Ace Car Reconditioning in 2003, a full-service reconditioning shop in Beaverton OR (auto body repair, detailing, interior repair, PDR, and more).  For years we had problems using our body shop to mix touch up paint.  My techs were burning a lot of time finding the factory code, entering it into a computer, mixing toners in minute quantities, and ultimately using just a few drops to fix the chips on a customer’s car.  It was an inefficient and expensive solution to a simple customer request.  We looked into buying a touch up kit, but what we found was expensive and complicated…essentially a smaller version of our body shop solution.

We made our own touch up system.  Just one, for us.

For 12 months we saved every cup of paint we mixed up for touch up jobs.  We started to see common colors.  About 300 of them.  Instead of mixing paint individually for every car we serviced, we used the closest matching paint among our 300 “saved” colors.  We had a revelation:  we didn’t need a 100% paint match to repair small rock ships and scratches.  The human eye couldn’t detect the difference between 100% and 90% color match on a few millimeters of paint.  We were working 50% faster, yet our customers noticed no quality difference.  On our dealer route, my tech would walk the car lot carrying this new touch up system in a toolbox and repair chips and scratches as I masked, sanded, primed, and painted bumper corners.  The dealers never noted any color mismatches on our touch up work.

In 2006, we took the ScratchOut kit to the public.

We found a niche:  detailers, mobile techs, and car detailers had been waiting for a simple but effective touch up system that sold for around $1000.  Their customers were asking for touch up service, but they had a limited budget, limited space in their work vehicles, and limited time to learn a new service.  Our kit was a perfect match.

Years of innovation and improvements. 400+ sold worldwide.

In 2008, we added demonstration videos on YouTube.  Sales tripled.  Internet video was the perfect sales tool for our company, which sells a relatively costly product to customers who cannot “touch and feel” our paint system before making a purchase decision.  Video gives our customers immediate, visual proof that our product performs as they expect it to.  Over the years, we’ve added a road rash removal process, DVD training, and improved packaging.  Tens of thousands of cars have been touched up with the ScratchOut kit and we hope you choose it to be the scratch and chip repair solution for your customers’ vehicles.