The first Eastwood catalog featured eight black and white pages of metal finishing equipment. By the early 1980s, the continued success took the catalog mailing operation into a professional list house: it reached 5,000 names by 1981 and kept growing. Today Eastwood mails over five million catalogs annually. In addition to catalog marketing, Eastwood sells its products directly through their retail outlet store, at select car shows, space advertisements, television sponsorship and the Internet.
The Eastwood Company is an Easthill Group, Inc. company.
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History
In the fall of 1978, Curt Strohacker started a new business to serve a new market: the auto restoration/customization hobby. He chose auto restoration from a life-long interest in old cars. During high school Curt worked in a service station, bought and sold innumerable vehicles, and learned some very valuable lessons about restoration - namely, the best ways to restore collector vehicles.
When the auto restoration market took off in the 1970s, Curt realized that the right tools and techniques could help thousands of other restorers save time and money.
In August 1983, both the Mercedes and BMW car club magazines unexpectedly endorsed an Eastwood car wash brush. Sales multiplied; so did the staff, which soon doubled. The discovery of the Eastwood spotweld gun proved even more fortunate. This tool duplicates industrial spotwelds (found on virtually every metal-bodied car), and does so for under $60. Commercial spotwelders typically start at $300 and up.
In the middle of 1989, Eastwood diversified into a new business related to the auto restoration hobby -- transportation collectibles and called it Automobilia Limited. It began with an Ertl model replica of Eastwood's restored 1951 GMC panel truck. The model sold very quickly at $14.95. Today, that first Eastwood model regularly trades for approximately $400 among collectors!
In July of 2000 the company relocated to its new state of the art 60,000sf facility located one-hour Northwest of Philadelphia in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
In the past few years, Eastwood company has seen changes in the marketplace resulting in greater need for products geared to muscle cars, street rods, motorcycles, and trucks in addition to the classics. In 2000 Eastwood broadened its marketing to include a new B2B division to expand its market share for private label branded paints, chemicals and formal HotCoat Powder Coating Systems. Eastwood's on-going commitment of providing unique products and innovative solutions to automotive, motorcycle and truck enthusiasts worldwide will certainly take it successfully through the century.