National Sales Manager for VOXX Electronics for the past 3 years, Pete Muller, has turned retailer, opening a Tint World shop along with his wife Barbara.
The shop in Orlando FL is unique in that it is the only one of the only Tint Worlds to carry JL Audio and also Kenwood Excelon. It has been open for 7 months, run mainly by Barbara, who left her job in warranty management for Honeywell.
Now Pete has left his job too (as of last week). He gets the opportunity to put into practice all those tenants that suppliers tell retailers to do.
“My primary focus will be similar to what I did at VOXX, which is developing our expediter/car dealer business channel — just in the local Orlando market instead of nationally,” Muller said adding, “Having worked for manufacturers for most of my career with some of the biggest expeditors in every market, I’ve gotten a lot of input from the super successful guys. I’ve asked them what works best and what doesn’t work; what helped them get into the big dealerships.”
The shop is one of the largest Tint World locations with a 1200 square foot showroom and 5,000 square foot air conditioned bay. And unlike most Tint World franchises, car audio and accessories is its biggest category, larger than window tint.
The store already sells far more remote starters than other Florida stores. “We’ve marketed it as cooling down your car. When people come in for window tint and want the car to be cooler we do a package for both,” said Muller, who sells Code Alarm.
Another advantage of coming from the supply side, Muller’s already won the confidence of many in the industry. It allowed him to find a top rate installation manager Chase Norman with 20 years’ experience in 12 volt under his belt, and a repeat member of the Mobile Electronics Top 100 Installers.
The store does a fair amount of custom fabrication and already works with a few local car dealerships although Muller’s goal is to be one of the largest expeditors in the state.
The store is in Seminole county, the wealthiest county in Florida, and not far from a Bentley, Rolls Royce and Alpha Romeo dealer.
It is already profitable despite the high overhead of a large building.
Another benefit from Muller’s role as a supplier (he has also worked for Dual Electronics and Azentek, which supplied car infotainment computers about a decade ago) is that he’s skilled at marketing. And since he carries brands not stocked by Tint World he does a lot of his own marketing. He’s posting one or two videos a week on social media of installs or new products.
Muller just picked up Roadwire leather seats, which will be a key focus in his expeditor packages for leather, mobile video, backup cameras and Apple CarPlay.
As for VOXX, Muller said, “We will continue to support the VOXX line. We love VOXX.”
Here’s a recent promotional video from Muller on a radar blind spot detection system. https://youtu.be/k0NownP9AuA
Photo: (from left) Pete and Barbara Muller
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Thanks Sean!!
Congrats, Pete!!