- We told you a long time ago
that when we hit 100,000 subscribers,
we'd actually tell you the truth
about Fitment Industries,
the history of Fitment Industries if you will,
and it actually seems to be coming up relatively quick,
and by the time this video drops,
I think we'll actually be there.
So I'm Alex from Fitment Industries,
and because everybody in the comment section
had asked for it,
here is the truth about Fitment Industries.
(hip hop music)
So before we get started,
don't forget to subscribe,
and of course, if you're looking for
wheels, tires, suspensions
head over to FitmentIndustries.com.
Now there's gonna be portions of this episode
that are gonna be covered by Jells,
because I find it very weird to talk about myself
and I just don't wanna do it.
So, let's get right into it.
So Fitment Industries was once known as Fitment Inc.
and was founded in February of 2017,
under the umbrella name of Custom Offsets.
Now if you haven't heard of Custom Offsets,
they are a truck aftermarket wheel company
that specializes in everything
that car guys do here for Fitment Industries
but for trucks, because America.
And up here in Wisconsin,
there's lik 12 trucks and 2 cars
and that's just how we do things around here,
but eventually there was enough car guys
at the Custom Offsets media team
that they thought, hey, why don't we do this for cars,
because that's kinda like,
it's cooler, they're sleeker,
cars are way better than trucks
in every way, shape, and form,
trucks are just over-hyped, expensive pieces of metal.
I don't know how much of that was actually true,
but the matter of the fact is that
people wanted to do something
with cars versus trucks,
and so over the course of the next few months,
essentially the Fitment Inc. name got established,
and you had probably one of the OGs,
you had Mario starting to
kinda delve into different sorts of car video styles
and making different edits and things like that.
But it didn't really start taking off
until September of 2017,
and that was when little old me
decided to come onboard and start essentially
the first team for Fitment Inc.,
and that was with Mario,
who was still working on
the Custom Offsets media team at the team.
And because of the overall summer,
and because the idea wasn't really having
a full force behind it,
a lot of the Custom Offsets media team
was actually helping out with
Fitment Inc. videos back on YouTube.
Now if you go back to our old videos,
you'll probably find that they weren't
super duper exciting to watch,
they had some spotlights, some wheel talks,
some match-ups and everything in between,
but relatively for the most part,
Fitment Inc. was kinda like lowkey.
But they weren't like hipster lowkey,
where it was cool to talk about them
because nobody else knew them,
just like nobody else really knew them.
So September came along,
and ultimately I came onboard
and I was hired as a Fitment Inc. lead.
Wow, that sounds really boring,
and from there, we decided to
actually have like a full team.
So from here, I'm gonna let
Jells take the reigns,
because I don't wanna talk about me
and it's really weird to talk about me,
so, Jells, you wanna come in?
- So, Alex was hired in September of 2017,
and Shawn, our CEO,
knew of Alex not only because of
Wisconsin Car Enthusiast Club,
which if you didn't know,
is the largest car club in Wisconsin,
and Alex is the founder of,
with 57,000 members.
Along with that, Alex also hosted
the River Valley Road Rally,
which Shawn wanted to be a part of,
and after that was done,
Shawn sought out Alex
to bring him in for an interview
because he saw the enthusiasm in Alex
and he saw his passion for cars,
and he was like hey, we need to get that guy on our team.
So he brought Alex in for an interview,
and as you can see, the rest is history.
- So now that Jells has explained that part,
which kinda a little bit weird
if I was talking about myself,
but we essentially went into Sema
not really knowing anything,
and thank God we had one viral video
that we came out with,
which was none other than
the XXR Wheel History,
it was the first Wheel History we've ever done,
and it was the first history video
we'd ever tried to do.
We had no idea what we were doing,
but we thought we'd give it a shot,
and turns out, it worked.
We ended up having a quarter million views on Facebook,
and ultimately people started to hear about us
about a week before Sema.
When we walked into Sema,
we had absolutely no idea what to expect.
Our Custom Offsets friends
obviously knew everything that was going on,
but when it came down to Fitment Inc.
at the time, we were pretty much clueless.
I wasn't even planning on being
in front of the camera for any videos,
but ultimately ended up shooting
almost 35 videos in that three day period
to get content out to YouTube,
and besides that, really all we did was
talk to different companies
that we thought may potentially
put up with us or may like us,
and left us with companies like Cosmis,
for instance, still puts up with us to this today,
which is pretty neat,
and we have other companies that we met up with too,
which was absolutely awesome.
So we were really excited,
we had Rohana, we had F1R, we had Regen5
and things like that,
and things were going great,
and then we came back,
and we were like,
well, what now?
You know, we had three sample wheels at the time,
and turns out a month after Sema,
we ended up getting wheel samples in,
which was unheard of at the time.
Our guys over at Custom Offsets
had like 40 wheel samples,
and within a month,
Fitment Inc. had like 45 wheel samples,
so we were kinda on to something,
it seemed to be working,
people wanted to know about wheels and tires
and all that sorta good stuff,
and people at Sema started to catch on
to what we were doing,
because we had that one viral video.
We continued to make those viral videos,
and I guess we just kept making stuff,
and people really enjoyed it,
you guys kept watching it,
and kept wanting more content,
kept asking us questions,
so we just decided that, you know,
if we're gonna do this,
let's just go all the way.
The best part about getting 40 wheel samples in house
is that when you already have
40 other wheels in a 6,000 square foot facility,
half of which is a shop,
1,500 of it is the media space,
you're left with a 1,500 square foot space
for about a hundred wheel samples,
it got a little tight.
We had actually no space.
So in February of 2018,
we moved from a 6,000 square foot facility
to a 28,000 square foot facility,
which still has like three hoists,
has a much bigger media space,
theater, kitchen, showroom, a warehouse,
and everything in between,
and we're already planning on
adding another 24,000 square foot space
so that we can actually make
more cool videos and content for you guys.
In January of 2018, Fitment Industries
saw a huge boost,
so we went from Fitment Inc. to Fitment Industries
because that's just a cooler name
and has absolutely nothing to do
with legality issues or anything like that,
but we decided to go into
trying to make more, like, bangers,
and we did, for the beginning of January,
we went from 3,000 subscribers
all the way up to 12,000 subscribers,
and we thought we were the coolest group of people ever.
We were like the cat's meow,
but really ever since then,
we just continued to grow.
We moved from that 6,000 square foot facility
into a 28,000 square foot facility
and the rest seems to pretty much be history.
Over the rest of the summer,
we continued to grow and grow and grow
and really the biggest thing that we wanted to do
was have a media team,
it was still predominately led by just
me, and Mario, and Corey,
who was our graphic designer that was an intern
that just never seemed to leave,
and we kinda had an online analytics guy,
his name was Dom,
but I mean, really, it wasn't like a team,
we were kinda like,
you ever just show up to a place,
like you go to a party or something like that,
and you go alone,
which is weird, so it's okay
if you say no because you wanna be a cool kid,
but like you show up to something alone,
and, like, you're with other people
that also showed up alone,
and you're just kinda like there,
and you're like well now that we're a unit,
now what do we do?
And that was the beginning
of Fitment Industries,
I mean, really, we were like,
okay, this is us, let's do it.
And we did.
I mean, we were continuously growing,
it was good, it was happy-go-lucky,
YouTube liked us, ish,
and then Facebook liked us, ish,
until Mark Zuckerburg got in trouble
for privacy stuff,
we're not gonna talk about that because legalities,
I mean, and it just continues to grow.
It's a really cool thing.
So once people started to realize
that we were like doing something
kinda sorta cool,
other companies wanted
to start working with us.
We had people sending us wheel samples
and t-shirts and all sorts of crazy stuff
because they wanted, you know,
to get content, they wanted us
to talk about their wheels.
And then we started talking about stuff
that they weren't like super apt to talk about,
but we still talked about it,
because in our eyes,
we want people to know normal stuff
about the wheel culture
to not be misled by people and by companies,
and even though there were some companies
that weren't huge fans of it,
they ultimately decided to partner with us
because we did way more help than harm,
I mean, if you really think about it,
we're just gonna tell people how it is,
and it worked out really well.
Then we decided we needed to offer other products
besides t-shirts and stuff,
so we started partnering with companies
that we could actually host higher-end products,
we have Avant-Garde and Rotiform Three Piece
and Work and Volk and Gram Lights and things like that,
and things really started to pick up.
Then we started hosting companies
like Acuware and Airlift and Eibach
and ST and KW and Belltech
and it just like never really stopped,
and over time, the company
just continued to grow
until we actually had something
that we could work with.
Now Fitment Industries consists
of people like myself,
it consists of people like Clair, Eric,
Dom and Corey, Mario, Jells, Steve,
and Greg, which is pretty cool.
We have people like Max and Austin,
that help us out with videography.
We have people like Jarrod and Parker
that help us out with videos,
I mean, we have a full team,
and even though the president
of both Custom Offsets and Fitment Industries,
Shawn, seems to be not very apparent
in a lot of Fitment Industries videos,
he still helps a lot with actually just
getting us established in certain places
so that we can help get content for you guys.
So, you might be wondering
who I am and what I'm involved in
and when it comes down to it,
I have a fancy title,
but I'm really just the kinda guy
that likes to make cool videos
and likes to make sure that you guys
know about wheels and tires
and Fitment Industries is like that,
it's just a YouTube channel that we all wanted to make,
because we were all car people,
then we all just came together
and we started making videos.
And that's pretty much it,
everything else is just an afterthought.
We have a really cool facility,
we're planning on building more,
we're planning on hiring a lot more people,
which you probably shouldn't tell 100,000 people,
but I mean, it's whatever.
So what are the plans for Fitment Industries?
You guys might be watching this and thinking
okay, so that's what they've done,
they really don't have that much of a history,
but they seem to be moving pretty quick,
or at least I would hope that you think that,
so what are we up to
and what do we plan to do?
Well, really what we want to do
is make cooler, high-end production films,
and we wanna continue to grow
this awesome team that we have here
with cool videographers, graphic designers,
and photographers,
and we wanna, like, get wheels to you guys,
and suspension parts, and information to you people
so that you can actually make cool decisions,
and you can buy your stuff from us,
and you can add your car
to the fastest growing online gallery,
which is ours, which is
FitmentIndustries.com/add.
And you can do all this stuff,
because at the end of the day,
we are just car enthusiasts
helping other car enthusiasts,
and honestly, it may sound like
a really weird business model,
but we think it'll just work.
And that's what we plan on doing.
So, I'm Alex from Fitment Industries,
let us know what you'd like us to talk about next
in the comment section below,
and if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe,
check out FitmentIndustries.com
if you're looking for wheels, tires, suspension,
and of course, like I said before,
I'm Alex from Fitment Industries,
and we'll see you later.
Peace.