Soave Enterprises has garnered a lot of attention for its latest diverse business endeavor – do-it-yourself automotive scrap sales. Bill Wild, President of the Detroit-based self-service salvage yard was recently contacted by Popular Mechanics to assist with an article on the growing trend of do-it-yourselfers in the automotive repair business. Soave’s affiliate, Parts Galore, is the ideal partner for the article because it operates three locations throughout Michigan which provide a combined total of 7,500 used vehicles for customers to search through and salvage parts.
The magazine’s Associate Auto Editor Ben Wodjila is both an avid automotive DIYer and a frequent visitor to Parts Galore facilities. Wodjila proposed an opportunity for nationwide exposure and a chance to spread the word about the savings and availability of quality used auto parts to repair older vehicles.
“I want to get back to the grassroots of what Popular Mechanics magazine was all about in my article, the do-it-yourselfer, and thought what a better place than Parts Galore,” said Wodjila. He and his photographers spent over 10 hours shooting pictures and interviewing employees. The article, entitled “Junkyard 101: How to Find Cheap Car Parts,” was published in the magazine’s September 2012 issue and can be viewed online at: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/repair/.
Leading the Industry with Benchmark Practices
Wodjila referred to Parts Galore as a benchmark of the industry’s best practices, referring to it as “well-operated” and possessing an “underlying logic” to the organization of vehicles. He also praised the usefulness of the yard’s database of all interchangeable components as a means of helping locate needed parts.
“Parts Galore is part of a new nationwide trend that’s cleaning up junkyards and making them easier and cheaper for regular folks to get into and, once inside, to find and retrieve parts on their own,” says Wild. “It’s a self-service yard with an enormous, ever-changing inventory of vehicles. That’s a niche nobody else really has in this area.”
Each location organizes the cars in rows according to the make, model and year. The company offers a unique array of used vehicles, each older than five years and some dating back to the seventies or earlier. Over 3,000 vehicles are turned over every month, so the inventory stays fresh. Prior to placement in the display area, all vehicles are environmentally processed in a state of the art facility where they undergo a comprehensive 17-step process that removes all environmental hazards such as gas, oil, mercury switches, etc. In short, Parts Galore extends Soave Enterprises’ dedication to environmental responsibility to each of their facilities which as Popular Mechanics notes, are also clean, well-organized, user-friendly.
Stemming Further Interest
Based on the article’s success, Popular Mechanic’s sister Hearst publication, Car and Driver, requested access to film a “Saturday Mechanic” segment which appears on their YouTube channel. Filming took place in August with producers and crews from New York, Chicago and Detroit congregating at the Flat Rock facility. The segment features Wodjila removing parts from Parts Galore vehicles and using them to repair a broken down vehicle.
About Parts Galore and Soave Enterprises
Parts Galore is part of the Soave Enterprises family of businesses. Its first location was founded in 2005 and the company has grown to encompass three separate locations throughout the Detroit area.
Soave Enterprises is a diversified management and investment company founded by Detroit businessman Anthony Soave that provides strategic planning, financial and other management resources to its affiliated business ventures in the real estate, automotive retailing, beer distribution, scrap metal, industrial services and transportation industries, among others. For more information on Tony Soave and Soave Enterprises, please visit http://www.soave.com.
Soave Enterprises
3400 E Lafayette
Detroit, MI
(313) 567-7000
http://www.soave.com
