BusinessTN

In the Fifties and Sixties, boys across the country could count on Charles Edward Card Jr. in Chattanooga to fire up their imaginations and their hot rods. Better known as “Honest Charley,” Card pioneered the mail-order car performance industry with a catalog bedecked with a snarling cartoon character and featuring the latest in after-market speed parts.

Today, thirty years since his death and 15 years after Honest Charley Speed Shop closed its doors, the brand lives on under the leadership of Chattanooga’s kings of specialty tires, Corky and David Coker. In the seven years they have owned the reborn Honest Charley’s, the Coker brothers have come to appreciate what the quirky founder knew from the beginning.

“We are doing all this business, and there is not a single customer who calls our phones or enters our Web site or walks in the door of our stores who absolutely has to have our products,” Joseph “Corky” Coker says of Honest Charley’s and his family’s original business, Coker Tire Co. “They don’t have to have them; they just want them.”

That’s why the Cokers’ father, a tire retailer first in Athens, Tenn., and then in Chattanooga, began buying old tire molds for antique and vintage cars in the late Fifties. Harold Coker had his own collection of old cars, and many of his friends shared the hobby. By the time Corky Coker finished college, father Harold’s interesting sideline was set to become a real business, Coker Tire Co. Corky Coker traveled the world buying old molds to make the tires, and arranging licensing agreements with the original tire manufacturers to put the original brand names on the tires.

Generally acknowledged today as the world’s leading supplier of vintage and specialty tires, Coker Tire owns tire molds, arranges manufacturing at two U.S. plants and at five plants in Taiwan, Vietnam and India, and then retails the tires. The company’s largest warehouse and shipping center remains in Chattanooga, located in a renovated historic register building in the Southside and filling a FedEx tractor-trailer with orders each day. A Fresno, Calif., store and warehouse permits one-day service to the West Coast.

"The catalog is the major source of business for us,” says marketing director Todd Harless, “But our Web business is beginning to grow. This is the first year we did over $1 million from the Web, which is a small percentage of the overall right now, but it is growing.”

The Coker catalog produces 300 to 700 calls daily, which result in the shipping of 600-1,200 tires a day, generating sales in excess of $1 million per month, according to Corky Coker. There’s nothing stagnant in vintage car tires—sales have grown by double digits each year for more than a decade, he says.

The Cokers are enjoying similar success with Honest Charley’s. They wisely brought back some old hands to run the place, including former sales manager Mike Goodman, who is president. Marketing custom, performance and restoration parts and specialty items (including a motorcycle powered by a V-8 engine), Honest Charley’s “has the potential to grow into a big business for us,” notes Coker marketing rep Kendall Kaylor, “and it is a natural expansion of our interests.”

“It does not matter if you sell biscuits, or widgets or vintage tires, “ says Corky Coker, leaning out the window of his bright red, restored 1957 Chevy convertible. “If you focus on customer service, you will grow. It’s not rocket science. It just takes deliberate, consistent work and making people happy.”