Hello, Kansas City, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast, the premier Kansas City Car Detailing business. We are so glad that you joined us today. You can’t see us right now because obviously you are either listening to this or you are reading it on the website, but Thomas and I are actually standing in Walmart in the car detailing aisle looking at all these different products and he was running through different products with me. This is great, this is not.
I was actually using this product wrong until he actually got to clean cars with a really famous car detailer entrepreneur. So, Thomas, can you tell us a little bit about where we’re standing and what are you currently looking at? Well, we’re currently standing in the Walmart aisle, car detailing aisle at Walmart and you know, I always, it’s always kind of like a no-no to buy anything off the shelf from Walmart or AutoZone or O’Reilly’s. You’re kind of like a cosmetologist buying their products from Walmart.
You’re like, I’m looking for salon quality, but…
That’s a great analogy, but I was like, you know, I’ve never actually walked through Walmart and looked at their stuff before like outside of grabbing like a towel to do an interior for and we’re walking down this aisle and I literally see a brand from a friend of mine who is an extremely famous car detailer and he owns Adams Polishes and I see his products being sold here. So, maybe I was wrong.
You know, even Jay Leno’s Garage brand is really pretty good. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. So, maybe, maybe Walmart isn’t all that bad.
So, one of the ones that I see here that you see at every single gas station, grocery store, anything that if they’ve got three items on the shelf for cars, it is the Armor All. My dad bought it recently when there was some sort of spill in our car and he just got it at a gas station because that’s what was available. But is it actually a good product?
I will literally throw Armor All away if I see it in a customer’s garage.
It’s really not that good, huh? It’s horrible. What about it do you not like? In all of their interior products, they use sheet fat to give it a really glossy finish but sheet fat, when it gets hot, it dries. It causes the leather to essentially dry rot.
So, over time, it can cause the leather to crack. It can cause it to, like, not like a crack like something that can be reconditioned or cleaned but like an actual crack in the finish. It’ll cause you to need your dashboard redone or your interior upholstery to need to be redone.
So, don’t ever use Armor All. Ever. Another one that you pointed out that I didn’t recognize but I see it all over the shelf is Chemical Guys.
Now, are they a good product? Are they not? If so, why not? Chemical Guys used to be really good and then they got bought out and whoever bought them out went the cheap China route. So, they started buying products from China and then just putting different scents in them and changing the colors of the products and when they rebranded, they began using a cheap Chinese brand that, you know, isn’t really that good. I mean, I’ll use their leather conditioner from time to time but, you know, they put the word ceramic.
It’s in every one of these bottles. Yeah, like right now, I’m looking at their hydro interior cleaner and, I mean, they’re claiming that it has a ceramic interior. Well, ceramics for exterior.
Ceramics for paint. They have it on their ceramic glass coating. Ceramic fabric.
It’s like, no. Like, they put ceramic in everything to make it sound fancy but it’s very, very frustrating as a detailer when someone says, well, I ceramic coated my interior. No, you didn’t.
So, you said Jay Leno’s. The next one to it is actually a relatively good brand. Yep.
I like, personally, on my personal cars, I’ll use Jay Leno’s garages stuff and then I’ll use Adams but, ideally, when it comes to products, I use stuff like G-Technic. I use Yum. So, for Kansas City car detailing packages that you offer, you use the highest quality brand.
Yeah. And products. I do not use Turtle X. I do not use Rain-X. I do not use Armor All on any of my Kansas City Car Detailing packages we offer.
Now, Rain-X is something I’ve heard about a lot because every time you go to a car wash, they’re always pitching it as some sort of add-on.
What about it? Do you like it or not? Does it actually work? Rain-X is kind of like the word Armor All. So, Armor All, they’re known for their interior wipes but now they have glass cleaner. Over here, with the Rain-X, you see, you know, Rain-X has a waterless wash.
Rain-X has a car wash. A ceramic X. It’s like, well, what’s the difference between their regular glass coating and their ceramic glass coating? Like, it all does the same thing. It just creates a hydrophobic finish.
Everyone’s put the word ceramic in their branding on, you know, off-the-shelf detail products and it’s just like, as a detailer, so frustrating because if you really understand what a ceramic coating does, putting the word ceramic in the branding of your product makes literally no sense. So, some of the things I see next to the interior cleaning are brushes, bristles, things like that, car dusters. I’m specifically right now looking at a California duster and this is another thing that if I do a paint correction on someone’s car and I find one of these in the car, I also throw it away.
What does it do to a car? So, just to me, if you’re listening, what it looks like is it kind of looks like what you brush out the inside of your garage with. Like, it’s big bristles with a long stick that looks like it’s for using on the hood of the car. A lot of car guys use them before they go to a car show.
So, if their car’s been sitting in their garage and they, it’s just collected some dust, they’ll use it
to dust their car off. But every time you touch paint, you’re scratching it. So, imagine just running a dry brush across your paint that’s literally smearing dust and dirt.
You are putting scratches in it every time you do it. It is, I mean, just two weeks ago, I did a beautiful correction job on a car and I opened the trunk to vacuum the trunk out and he had a California duster in it and I threw it away. It’s that bad for your car, huh? It’s that bad for your car.
Wow. So, next to it, I see detailing towels that are tearaways. What kind of towels do you recommend if somebody’s just wanting to wipe down their car? Is there a specific type or brand that you recommend? You’ll want to use an edgeless plush towel for, like, detailing.
Um, I don’t really like buying any product where it’s open like this or it’s not in a closed package because… Except for the package, the towels are exposed. Somebody could drop it on the floor. Now, when they dry their car, it’s gonna get scratched.
You don’t know. So, I really only buy these types of towels that are exposed like that for doing interior detailing. You know, something like this.
Something that’s wrapped up in a big tube that’s inside of a plastic covering when you buy it. But this is also too thin and it’s also exposed. So, this completely defeats the purpose of having edgeless because these edges are exposed.
So, edges of the packaging are exposed even though the majority of the package is open. It’s closed. It’s still a little bit open.
This is something that if this wasn’t… Coral fleece final finish towels. I would 100% use these except the packaging is open.
I mean, when you run this across the cash register, they’re gonna swipe it across and pick up all of the dust and dirt. You almost need to wash them before you can use them. Yeah, nothing beats cleaning a car than using a towel for the first time when it’s not washed.
It’s perfectly clean. So, if somebody’s wanting to receive a Kansas City Car Detailing service, how would they get a hold of you to get that done?
You would reach out to me at 620-282-0402 to book one of our Kansas City car detailing services or if you want to go online to bespokerefinement.com, you can view all of our different Kansas City car detailing packages there as well.