(bird chirps)
(car whooshing)
(tires sloshing)
- My name is Alex Martinez,
and I am part of a family of four.
I have a dad, a mom, and an older brother.
My dad moved up from Matamoros, Mexico,
when I wasn't even born yet.
My mom was in healthcare in Chippewa Falls,
and my brother's four years older than me,
and we've always kinda had a pretty interesting life.
When I was young, we lived in a trailer park,
we didn't really have a whole lot.
In fact, I remember that when I got good grades,
my dad would end up buying me like a four-pack of Oreos
from the nearby gas station as my treat
for doing a good job.
I grew up, and we moved, and one of the things
that I had found to be super exciting
was finding a way to have a creative outlet, I guess,
would be the adult way of saying things now,
but really it was all about just having fun,
and as I grew up, my lifestyle was actually pretty stern,
it was straightforward, it was pretty black and white.
My parents never like hearing me say strict,
but strict would definitely be the term I would use.
When I was 10 years old, I remember getting my first camera.
That never left my hand,
and it had the little wrist strap on it,
and it popped out, and I had a four gigabyte SD card
that I saved up like six months for
so I could buy an SD card for the camera.
I really started to enjoy that,
and I really loved photography, and what I learned
is that there was another thing
that I was really starting to grow into
that nobody else in my family really enjoyed,
and that was cars.
(introspective orchestra music)
In my hometown,
it wasn't the most spectacular thing in the world
because it was just so taxing.
The whole local scene was pretty rough to begin with.
If you weren't a part of that scene,
you really just weren't kind of welcome,
and it always felt a little weird,
so no matter what you brought, nobody really cared.
For me, it was more just about
kinda having fun and learning,
and trying to make myself better to make others better,
but it didn't seem like the community really cared.
I ended up starting my own car club in Wisconsin
back in 2013, which was nothing more than just a group
of local people that had the same mindset as me,
so you get together, and hang out, and grill out,
and have fires, and just be friends
and kinda help each other work on their cars.
It started out as kind of just a small group,
and then all of a sudden a lot of people,
I guess you would say,
kind of agreed with the same mentality,
and we ended up hosting events and things like that,
and I ran into the owner of Custom Offsets.
He was at one of our shows,
he was at one of our events, he absolutely loved it.
So, Fitment Industries really started to take off
and it was that same thing, and as we grew into it,
I had no idea what I was doing.
I had no idea that I was gonna be in front of the camera,
I had no idea that I was gonna be filmed,
I had no idea that I was gonna have to talk to people,
I really had no idea about any of it.
I didn't know I was gonna be in front of the camera
until I walked into the halls of SEMA in 2017
and realized that we just had to have somebody
in front of the camera, and as FI grew,
and YouTube, and the whole community thing
really started to blow up,
it just became more and more apparent that
that's what it was about,
and so as I have gone through the vehicles that I've owned,
and the things that I've done to them,
one thing that I've always tried to do
is I've tried to remind myself what cars are really about,
and to a lot of people, you know, it means one thing,
and to a lot of other people, it means something else,
but to me, it reminds me to have fun.
It reminds me to be different.
It reminds me to enjoy the things
that I have been able to enjoy,
it allows me to remind myself
of all the hard work that we've put through on an idea,
or on a thing, but also so that
I don't take myself too seriously.
When I picked up the 911, I was pretty much set
on trying to just make it what I thought it should be,
which is a very simple design,
just something very minimalistic and nothing too crazy,
and I fell into the trap that I told myself
I would never fall into, and that was the trap
of taking cars too seriously.
That's why the car ended up being the way that it is now.
I think one of the biggest things is that,
you know, trying to figure out how to express yourself
is probably one of the biggest challenges in life
for a lot of people, and if you don't have a way
to kind of express yourself,
and have some sort of creative outlet,
regardless on if it's cars or not,
you're pretty much just doing yourself a disservice.
Take the seriousness out of it,
and just enjoy something for what it is,
and make something yours.
That's why the car is the way that it is,
and that's why I'm happy to have partnered
with companies like ESR to do a brand new
floating spoke design.
That's why I am super happy to partner with IVS Wraps
and Scheffel for the design and things like that,
that's why I'm very happy to have all of those guys
come together, and instead of telling me what I should do,
more just helping me create what I wanted to do,
so if there's anyone out there
that is having trouble trying to figure out
what that thing is going to be, or whether they fit in
with the car scene, or car community,
or they don't know what they're supposed to do to their car,
just sit down, think about it,
ask yourself, why are you in the scene,
and why are you doing what you're doing,
and I think the answer is
is if you're doing it for somebody else,
you're always gonna have a bad time,
but if the answer is is that you're doing it for you,
then at least you're on the right path
and you can go the right way.
With that being said, I'm Alex from Fitment Industries,
hope you guys enjoyed, don't forget to subscribe.
We will see you later, peace.
(epic orchestra music)