Meguiar’s began with furniture polish mixed one bottle at a time
For more than a century, four generations of one family turned a homemade polish into a car-show fixture, until 3M bought the business in 2008.
Irvine, CA
At a family gathering, someone handed Barry Meguiar’s 3-year-old grandson a toy car to keep him busy through dinner. The boy didn’t play with it. He unfolded his napkin and wiped the car down with great care, burnishing every surface.
Barry Meguiar was then president and chief executive of the car-care company his grandfather had started, and he watched proudly. “Nobody told him to do that,” he told the Orange County Business Journal in 2001. “It’s in the blood.”
The family line ran back to 1901, to a product that had nothing to do with cars. In Evansville, Indiana, Frank Meguiar Jr. began making furniture polish in his garage. He mixed it with an eggbeater, one bottle at a time. Over the next century his sons and grandsons built it into a name known to body shops and car-show regulars around the world. The family ran the business for four generations. Meguiar’s has been owned by 3M, the manufacturer based in St. Paul, Minnesota, since 2008.
Two kinds of stubbornness run through the story. The founder refused to sell anything he didn’t believe was the best on the market. His grandson spent decades at car shows, more interested, he said, in growing the hobby than in selling wax.
Frank Meguiar Jr. had 12 children. According to the company’s published history, he made polish at night to fill the orders he would drum up the next day, and those sales paid for the family’s groceries. The company’s German-language history adds a tin tub to the mixing gear and credits his family with helping.
Cars came next. Early automobiles had wooden bodies coated with the same finishes used on furniture, and the German history says he noticed owners using his furniture polish on them. He adapted the formula. The company’s history says he held to one rule from the first bottle: no product went out unless he was convinced it was the very best of its kind on the market.
He died in 1950. His three sons had been his business partners, and they took over. Maurice, the oldest, was sales manager. Kenneth, the youngest, ran production. Malcolm, Barry’s father, shared his father’s love of formulating.
Early on, the mainstay was Mirror Glaze, a line of professional waxes. Car buffs found it anyway. By the 1960s, as car shows multiplied, enthusiasts were asking stores for Mirror Glaze products that were sold only through professional shops, the company’s history says. In that decade Meguiar’s was already running ads in enthusiast magazines such as Hot Rod, Sports Car Market reported in 2008.
Barry was out at the shows himself. “In 1965, I was going to car shows and supporting car guys by myself,” he told the Orange County Register in 2013. His wife, Karen, had gone to every trade show for 38 years, he told the Business Journal in 2001, and he called her the company’s unofficial ambassador.
The turn came in 1973. Up to then, Meguiar’s employed six people. That year it decided to mass-market products under the Meguiar’s name, and the company’s history marks 1973 as the launch of its Classic Line for consumers. Demand carried the products into Pep Boys, Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target. By 2001 the company counted more than 230 workers and made more than 300 products, for cars, boats, plastics and leather, and even for carpets and drapes.
The professional side stayed. The company kept technicians in its training center and sent them to assembly plants, body shops, detailers and car clubs to demonstrate the products. It had partnered its professional line with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the boat maker Correct Craft. Professionals bought a multistep system of polishes and waxes, while consumers got one-step products, Sports Car Market reported in 2008.
The family filled the organization chart. In 2001, Barry ran the company from its offices in Irvine, California. His cousins Frank and Mike ran the manufacturing plant in Nashville, where a grandson and three great-grandsons of the founder also worked, and Mike served as chairman. Barry’s uncle Kenneth, then 73 and the youngest of the three brothers, was a major shareholder and still involved in operations. Barry’s daughter ran the catalog division, and her husband was vice president of sales and marketing.
Barry laid out the house rules for the Business Journal. “Being in the family dictates you keep two secrets: first you don’t tell anyone what goes in the products,” he said. “Second, you don’t tell anyone what our sales are.”
Buyers had already come calling, he told the paper. “We could sell the business and put a lot of money in our pocket,” he said. “But we’re having too much fun.”
What set Meguiar’s apart, he said, was that “we are car guys.” He added: “We’re not trying to understand through market research what a car guy is.”
The car-guy part went deep. “I was always a car guy. My first word was car. I’ve got the car crazy gene, and I’ve always had it,” he told the Register in 2013, as the Dana Point Concours d’Elegance prepared to give him its automotive Icon award.
The company had worried that the hobby itself might fade. “Sixteen years ago, we were afraid it would go away because it was mostly older folks like me at car shows,” he told the paper. The answer came to him at a rally, while Carroll Shelby was telling him a story. “I wonder how many millions of car guys would love to be sitting where I am right now listening to Carroll Shelby tell me a story,” he recalled thinking, in the same interview.
That idea became Car Crazy, a television show Barry hosted. It ran on the Speed channel for 16 years and moved to Velocity, part of Discovery, in 2013. In 2007, Car Crazy Central was set to host SEMA TV for the fourth straight year, with live interviews running on screens throughout the SEMA Show hall in Las Vegas. In the years before the sale, Sports Car Market reported, one of the first things SEMA visitors saw was a giant stage for remote broadcasts of the show. Meguiar’s big rigs traveled to shows, and its banners hung at vintage car venues and classic car auctions.
“All my life I’ve been more focused on growing the hobby than selling car wax because I love the car hobby,” he told the Register.
The fully synthetic NXT line had come out in 2004, and the Ultimate line followed in 2008, according to the company’s history. That year the company was promoting the fact that 20 of the 24 Best of Class winners at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance had chosen its polishes and waxes, Sports Car Market reported.
The same year, the family business changed hands. In 2008, 3M announced an agreement to buy Meguiar’s, which then employed about 115 people at its Irvine headquarters. 3M had 79,000 employees worldwide. The deal closed later that year, Coatings World reported. 3M’s automotive aftermarket division already sold abrasives, masking tapes, adhesives and paint-finishing compounds to body shops, and Meguiar’s brought its waxes, polishes, cleaners, conditioners and protectants for cars and boats.
“Combining with 3M will greatly enhance our ability to support and serve Car Crazy people on a global basis,” Barry Meguiar said in the announcement, as Sports Car Market reported in 2008.
He kept his own cars out of sight. “The last thing I want to do is display a car and be in competition with my customers,” he told the Register. He made one exception. In 2011, Pebble Beach invited him to put a 1901 Duryea on the lawn, and he did, though not in competition.
“I have it because 1901 is the year my grandfather started my company,” he told the paper. “That’s what cars looked like when my grandfather started the business back in Evansville, Indiana, in 1901.”