with one of the company's products.
Company: Davin Wheels
Location: Providence
Employees: 13
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Type of business: Custom wheels
Annual sales: Nearly $4 million
Just hours before the official launch of his company’s inaugural product, David Fowlkes decided to make a dry run.
Fowlkes had spent the better part of the 1990s tweaking his design for a “spinning wheel,” a rim with an embedded plate that spins via a ball-bearing system, producing a slow-motion effect. He and two business partners founded Providence-based Davin Wheels in 2000.
By the eve of the Los Angeles Auto Show in January 2001, the kinks had been worked out – but the prototype had yet to be tested on a vehicle. So Fowlkes rented a beige 1999 Lincoln Navigator, stealthily replaced the wheels with a prototype set of rims, and went for a drive outside of L.A.
“It was about 11:30 at night, and we drove into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger,” Fowlkes said. “A kid got out of his car, looked at the truck and said ‘those are the sickest wheels I’ve ever seen in my life.’ He just stood there baffled.” Fowlkes made an impromptu video of this maiden voyage to play alongside the car-show booth.
Fast forward to March 2003. Davin Wheels’ high-end rims have appeared in Rolling Stone, Car & Audio Electronics and The Source – the bible of hip-hop culture. They’ve spun their way into MTV music videos and spots on Black Entertainment Television. Customers include Shaquille O’Neal of the L.A. Lakers and rap star Nelly.
Davin Wheels quickly sold out of 300 sets of wheels in both 2001 and last year. It plans to double production this year and recently opened a 12,000 square-foot assembly and distribution center in California, through the help of a $200,000 loan from Rhode Island Economic Development Corp.
Revenues approached $4 million last year and are projected to eclipse $8.5 million in 2003 – a figure chief financial officer Hank Seemore calls conservative. With 13 employees and virtually no advertising, Davin Wheels’ reputation for quality and innovation has cemented its place in the $2 billion custom-wheel market.
“If you don’t want to be seen, then don’t buy these wheels, because you’re gonna get looks,” Fowlkes said last month while displaying the company’s latest line, the Revolution 4.0, at its West Exchange Street headquarters.
The four-piece, forged-aluminum rim sports gleaming, mirror-like chrome, with customized inserts of veneer wood or carbon fiber. Individual bolts are inscribed with the “Davin” name. Each set has its own three-digit serial number, another detail to add to the brand’s elite aura.
The rims are big – 19, 20, 22 or 24 inches in diameter – and most often are found on high-end sedans and sport utility vehicles, such as Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac and Hummer. A set of four rims for, say, a Mercedes G500 SUV – sans tires – runs about $14,000.
Although Davin Wheels officially markets its wheels to the “elite auto enthusiast,” it owes much of its success to the chord it has struck within the world of hip hop. The company got its biggest boost after its spinning rims appeared in a segment of “MTV Cribs” spotlighting the opulent lifestyles of NBA stars.
Since then its has amassed a swelling customer list of rich rap stars and professional athletes. Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers; football stars Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens; rapper Master P; comedian Martin Lawrence.
“We understand that the association of a high-end product like ours appeals to that customer,” Seemore said of the company’s rap-star, “baller” client mix.
But founders insist that the market for their wheels is wider.
“The bottom line is we design toward luxury,” Fowlkes said. “Many people fall under that market. It’s hip hop, but it’s also bankers on Wall Street. It’s actresses in Hollywood. We had a 70-year-old Florida retiree who bought our wheels for his Lexus.”
In fact, the company is broadening its product line this year to appeal to women and more-conservative luxury car owners with – gasp! – a non-spinning wheel.
While Davin Wheels threw the custom-rim market for a loop with the industry’s very first spinning-wheel design, it was, of course, not the last. The invention has spawned a spate of poser wheels and cheap hubcaps – not a big surprise in an industry as fertile a ground for knockoffs as the watch or purse business.
“We understood that the imitations were going to come,” Fowlkes said. “Any time you have a good idea with a cost associated with it, people are going to take that idea and make it cheap.”
The story of Davin Wheels is entrepreneurial to its core.
While working for Reebok as a shoe designer in 1998, Fowlkes met Ian Hardman, a Reebok marketing manager (now Davin Wheels’ chief executive officer), and Seemore, then a vice president in FleetBoston Financial’s private clients group. It was the heart of the 1990s technology boom, and the three set out to start a company. Any company.
After months of fruitless brainstorming ideas – a dot-com, an apparel company, an entertainment firm – Fowlkes finally grabbed from his shelf the “spinning wheel,” an invention from a class project years earlier while a student at the Minneapolis College of Art + Design. He laid it on his coffee table in his Boston apartment.
Seemore and Hardman stared at the object blankly. Eventually they agreed it was pretty cool – but was there a viable market?
The trio, all in their 30s, sank more than $100,000 of their own money into the venture. They worked out of Fowlkes apartment, and later from a 300 square-foot office on Mineral Spring Avenue. They chose Providence for proximity’s sake; they live in Boston, Philadelphia and Connecticut.
But Seemore said he still didn’t quite get it – not until he arrived in California for the show and saw the rims on a cherry red Lincoln Navigator. His reaction paralleled the kid outside the In-N-Out Burger.
“I was moved,” Seemore said. “I called my wife and said ‘I think we’re really on the brink of something big.”
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