OEM Wheels – Don’t Overlook This Hidden Profit Center

If you own or operate an automotive dealership, you’ve no doubt structured your business to generate profits throughout your Parts, Service, Sales and F&I Departments. While well-known profit opportunities exist in each area, one of the most often-overlooked profit centers is also among the most obvious– Original Equipment Factory (OEM) wheels.

How so? At Wheel Craft, we’ve geared our business around handcrafting the absolute finest wheel finishes for luxury-brand OEM wheels. Our goal is to create special experiences that give your customers an unmistakable sense of luxury, performance and empowerment at every turn. In doing so, we also transform OEM wheels into a significant dealership profit center.

What makes this even more appealing? Participating in the Wheel Craft Original Factory Wheel Program is a winning move for not just one element of your business, but all of them.

Consider how Wheel Craft can deliver significant benefits throughout your dealership:

Sales Department:

• Drives unit sales – Wheel Craft creates and nurtures market awareness digitally and drives customers into your dealership to see the product first-hand.
• Empowers customers – They select the finish they want.
• Creates showroom buzz – vehicles featuring Wheel Craft finishes are dramatically appealing and designed to generate maximum showroom traffic
• Offers outstanding value for your customers – We offer a standard 5-year warranty against brake dust burns, chipping, peeling, color separation, corrosion and finish damage caused by road salt and car wash chemicals.
• Dealer trade guarantee – Wheel Craft will reimburse your dealership for moving wheels between pre-loaded cars in the event of a dealer trade of customer preference. We eliminate front-of-store risk by helping you drive unit sales, separating your dealership from the competition, distinguishing your inventory and offering our dealer trade guarantee.
• Enhances customer experience – Wheel Craft is singularly focused on providing exceptional customer experiences from initial inquiries through purchase and installation and beyond. We strive to build customers for life.

Parts Department:

• One central control point for program – Wheel Craft controls the receipt and return of cores to complete the exchange process, taking that burden off your shoulders. Our custom wheel finish program can also drive Parts Department revenue by facilitating cross-department sales opportunities.
• Eliminates ALL dealer inventory risk – Wheel Craft commits 100 percent to inventory investment. We maintain a dedicated inventory of factory wheels to facilitate quick and painless exchange transactions. There is NO investment or inventory hold for dealers.
• Helps secure dealership business model – Wheel Craft fits seamlessly with a dealership’s Fixed Ops model.

Service Department:

• Facilitates quick turnaround – Wheel Craft provides a 5-day delivery guarantee on all orders for quick customer fulfillment, without the need for racking cars and pulling wheels
• Drives customer service, revenue and CSI
• Helps nurture a premium image for your dealership
• Offers maximum labor rate profitability
• Leverages strong CRM platform
• Provides opportunities for expanded sales – Wheel Craft’s customer marketing is designed to help boost Service Department traffic and exposure in the dealership.

F&I Department:

• Builds team relationship with sales – When your Sales Department displays cars with dressed wheels, F&I has an opportunity to stress the value proposition of wheel and tire protection plans.
• Leverages protection products and enhances Sales Team relationships.
• Drives connection with customers

Learn how the Wheel Craft exchange process works.

Our Original Factory Wheel Program is designed to help dealerships offer their customers the highest quality, most durable wheel finishes available anywhere—with confidence that their efforts will be supported 100 percent by us. In doing so, it helps you strengthen customer loyalty and boost revenues across your dealership.

One final point we’d like you to consider: As we said earlier, profit drives business for any business, including automotive dealerships. Yet, for any automotive brand – and luxury brands such as Lexus, BMW and Infiniti in particular – it’s paramount to maintain brand integrity in everything you do. Strong brand integrity strengthens brand preference with customers over time and helps ensure that the vehicles you sell represent well in all contexts.

What’s the significance, you ask? OEM wheels are designed for the vehicles that ride on them; manufacturers spend millions of dollars to ensure that. Conversely, aftermarket wheels don’t necessarily offer that same level of assurance, and as a result, durability, handling and/or performance issues may arise that can erode brand integrity among your valuable customer base.

At Wheel Craft, we apply our proprietary next-gen finishes to factory wheels only—this is not an aftermarket product that could compromise durability, handling or performance. It’s an ideal way to maintain brand integrity when it comes to customizing OEM wheels and rims while enhancing profits throughout your business.

We hope this blog helps you understand the many ways that Wheel Craft’s Original Factory Wheel Program can drive unit sales, productivity, revenue and CSI while optimizing brand integrity. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our program in more detail. Please contact Wheel Craft at 833.639.4231 or email Ed Hollinshead, company President.