In our line of business, there's a lot of rational processes in making decisions.  There are high costs and squeezing margins, so you need to be crystal-clear about what to invest in that'll add value to the experience and satisfaction of your customers via the service that you give them.

To do that you want choices, features and benefits.  You also want to get all of the most valuable aspects in as few choices as possible, otherwise you end up spending more time thinking about what to do than actually doing it.

Although using guard and fender covers enhance your business image, also providing promotional value and additional revenue through merchandising, when used in your workshop they're an offset cost.  This means that they cost you up front but over time they will save you (potentially, significantly by reducing damage liabilities).

Once you've made the right decision to use them, you need to compare.

Apart from the style, colour and branding options we offer, our guard and fender covers incorporate all of the required features that are sometimes offered as options by our competitors.  That way your choices are down to the exciting stuff like choosing colours and print graphics.

So ask yourself of guard covers, are they made of tough, durable vinyl?  Do they have a soft, fleece backing to protect the paintwork?  Do they use sand-filled channels to hold them in place instead of magnets that attract metal fragments?  Do they have a tool channel on the top of the cover?  Do they have a generous overhang to cover as much of the fender on just about any car?  Do they have a wheel-arch cutout so the front wheels can still turn and not rub on the cover?  Are there cutouts at either end so they can butt up close to the firewall while clearing bonnet hinges, etc?  Are they available in a variety of colours?  Can they be custom-branded with your business name, logo or visual identity? Are they available in several styles, including single, 3-piece and 4-piece wrap around sets?

Compare our guard covers and sets to Brand X and if you can't answer yes to all of these questions, then contact us about the save part.

We recently launched our new Repeat seat protector, which is made from recycled PET bottles. 

Here's the story behind Repeat.  It's a longer post, but a really interesting one and worth the read.  To check out the Repeat seat protector, click here. 

Polyethylene terephthalate - commonly abbreviated to PET - is a thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family most commonly associated with food and drink containers.

Interestingly, though, it was initially developed as a material from which cloth (polyester, dacron and terylene) was produced and most of the world’s PET production still is for synthetic fibres (more than 60 per cent: think polar fleece, carpeting, sails and space blankets as well as for various industrial uses) with bottle production accounting for around 30 per cent of global demand.

PET was patented in 1941 by British chemists John Whinfield and James Dickson of the Calico Printers' Association of Manchester and the PET bottle was patented in 1973.

While most thermoplastics can, in principle, be recycled, PET bottle recycling is more practical than many other plastic applications. The primary reason is that plastic carbonated soft drink bottles and water bottles are almost exclusively PET, which makes them more easily identifiable in a recycle stream.

Recycling PET bottles saves 84 per cent of the energy it takes to make new bottles from raw PET, however according to a spokesman for a Sydney recycling centre, less than 10 per cent of PET bottles produced are actually recycled.

Given one PET bottle equals one PET bottle, theoretically, if every bottle was recycled, there would be no need to create new PET. That being said, the reality is the discrepancy between bottles produced and bottles returned.

The other issue is one of clarity. Over time, with multiple processing, the transparency is affected: in other words, the recycled bottles aren’t as clear. That can be an issue for food and beverage presentation in particular. Also, if a manufacturer wants a coloured bottle, they need a percentage of virgin material to keep the colour true.

Although PET production is an important segment of polymer production, it should not be confused with polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP), which are both produced more throughout the world. PE is widely used, especially in the production of the plastic shopping bag while the fatigue-resistant and recyclable PP has a variety of uses including packaging, textiles, stationary, plastic parts, lab equipment and parts for automobiles.

Aside from Repeat^tm, Smart Automotive also uses non-woven polypropylene (NWPP) for its products. It is actually called non-woven polypropylene because the cross-hatched ‘pattern’ on the material is stamped on to make it look woven.

While the term ‘environmentally friendly’ implies that PET and polypropylene leaves no ecological footprint, that’s not entirely true. Obviously they are manufactured using fossil fuels and so contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. However, they contribute to waste reduction (because they’re recyclable) and the movement away from one-use products, which means the ecological impact is smaller than that of similar alternatives.

Check out our Repeat seat protector and make an enquiry today.