Meet keith kaucher of santa monica

Today we’d like to introduce you to keith kaucher

Hi keith, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

I am celebrating 30 years in business this year. Kaucher Kustoms has been in the custom car design business since 1994, though the original name was Kaucher Designwerks. I started the business because of my lifelong passion for classic American cars and hot rods. When I was 13 years old, I realized what I wanted to do, was become a car designer.

However, my life took some twists and turns and I didn’t end up getting my degree in design until my early 30’s, this late start for me motivated me to get things started as fast as I could. I wasn’t sure how I would get the business going.

Though I was offered a limited scholarship from Art Center I had an apartment and an adult life to pay for, and I knew that Art Center is a full time job in itself and I needed to earn a living, so I applied and was accepted at California State University Northridge in their Industrial Design Program, though it was great program, I knew Art Center students would have a great advantage over me with their training being far more focused on Transportation Design whereas mine was more consumer product oriented.

While I was still in college I started submitting my designs to car magazines, I got a few of my designs published and the pay was pretty good back then. It just wasn’t consistent so I knew I needed to get a full-time design job. I wanted to work in the auto industry, but I knew I’d be competing with Art Center students and they would get the car styling positions I wanted to work in, I figured there had to be a backdoor into the corporate auto industry. The realization for me was the wheel industry.

I submitted resumes to almost all the local aftermarket wheel manufactures I knew of and a was asked to interview with about six of them. I ended up being hired by Superior Industries in Van Nuys CA. It was a really good job, and I learned a lot there not just the wheel industry but about the corporate car design industry as well, because Superior was a 1st tier supplier to major car companies such as ford, GM, Toyota Nissan, BWW and many more and part of my job was to go to their design studios and meet with their designers and engineers to go over what they were looking for in a wheel to freshen up and older car design.

This was 1995 I was now working for Superior as a wheel designer 40 hours a week and running my design business in my free time working many nights to 2 and 3 AM getting my design illustrations ready for magazines. The magazine coverage soon got a few clients calling me about helping them with a design for a custom car they were building. It started out slowly but continued on. In 1999 I made the decision to change companies and go work for another aftermarket wheel company as an in-house designer.

It was while I was interviewing, I was told that I could make far more money as a freelance designer and get paid royalties for the designs than working a 9 to 5 in-house job. I ended up in a bidding war between two-wheel companies and ended up designing for both. At one point I was designing wheels for six manufactures, I was making more money than I ever dreamed of.

My brother Mitchell who was working as an attorney in 2005 was very unhappy, and wanted to get into the wheel business with me doing all the business side of it to free me up to work solely on the creative side and at first it was going well we weren’t getting rich but we were making a living.

Then two death blows came in between 2005 and 2008, The wheel market was changing. The American manufactures were getting priced out of the market by Chinese Import wheels this change cause many American manufactures closed their American plants in favor of Chinese plants and the royalty-based salaries was all but an industry memory. In 2007 the royalty checks were one tenth of what they were the year before, and then came the crash of 2008. My business was hanging on by a thread.

It was at that point with the wheel industry now a ghost town as far as revenue, we turned all our attention back on the custom car design side of the business. We solicited more magazines, and started buying booth spaces at custom car shows to advertise the business and meet people one on one. This began to turn around and we were earning a decent living, but it was short lived by 2010 the business would no longer support both of us and my brother left to return to the legal industry.

Since 2010 I’ve continued on by myself , I’ve added additional service under the company name such as automotive restoration and resto-modification work out of the shop in back of my home, and working in the legal field doing expert witness work in automotive related cases. I have to say that with all the down turns and quite frankly chaos, I’m still here 30 years later.

What my business has needed more than anything is exposure. I have a few competitors in the industry that were like me struggling, but landed that big celebrity client that love cars and wants theirs to be unique and that exposure catapulted them to the top.

I work my business everyday with the hope and that goal, to land that big account, and to brand the Kaucher Kustoms logo and start merchandising products, creating a passive stream of income.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

I work in a field where very rich people play, they hire me to design or should I say re-design their vintage Detroit Iron to make them show winner’s. This is a hobby that requires a lot of money. some of the car’s I’ve designed cost a million dollars to build. the average price of a car that I’ve designed runs at least $200K to build. I take a unique approach to designing a custom car I always look at what the original designers might’ve wanted to do before the accounting department said no.
I love concept cars from the fifties and sixties so I create themes for the cars design based on historical background and styling of that prior of time that might’ve happened with a particular set of circumstances. For instance, I designed a 1969 Camaro station wagon. The theme there was what if Chevy had experimented with a “Sportwagon” version of their popular Camaro, (of which GM stylist in fact did mock up in clay).

I designed the car to mimic what Chevrolet stylist were doing at that time by integrating a ’69 Chevelle wagon roof onto a Camaro, I added a small duck tail at the trailing edge of the roof to look like what the Chevy Vega wagon looked like to make it look like the Camaro wagon forecast the styling of the Vega model line that would be introduced in 1971. Most of my competition in this field tends to just dress up a vintage car with aggressive looking boy racer styling cues some of which is really exciting but not really me style because I find that it’s trendy, and won’t hold up 10 years from now I focus on creating something that is timeless and will never look dated.

How do you think about luck?

I was in the right time and place back in 1999 when I became a freelance aftermarket wheel designer and I ended up with a great royalty-based salary that allowed me to work only 8 months out of the year if I chose to do so. But a major change in the wheel industry because of outsourcing almost hurt the aftermarket wheel industry and changed it forever. Despite that I have reinvented my business and kept it going and I’m still here marking my 30th anniversary this year I look forward to where the business is headed in the future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kaucherkustoms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaucher_kustoms/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063501312801#/kkaucher?ref=profile
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4sCxJWb5ffIqAcYhOrnSnQ
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/kaucherkustoms/

Image Credits
Keith Kaucher