Shine My Ride by Empire Auto Detailers

Motor Vehicle ManufacturingMaryland, United States2-10 Employees

Shine My Ride by Empire Auto Detailers was founded in 2006 by Damon and Natasha Gadson. We named the company “Empire” because we both are from New York and as everyone knows it’s the Empire state. Our colors are blue and orange for a few reasons. Many of our favorite sports teams and our alma mater all use blue and orange as their colors. We are both graduates of Morgan State University plus we are both NY Knicks and NY Mets fans. With that being said orange and blue was just a natural choice. We started Empire as a “mobile only” detailing company based out of our home garage. We had one van, one employee, and a drive to be the best detail company in the world.
about-us-van
Unlike other detail companies, we specifically avoided working with car dealerships and focused our efforts on corporate accounts to build our customer base. These strategies lead us to capture accounts such as Lockheed Martin, Choice Hotels, WTOP, Kearny Company and CISCO among others. This served to be a great early move because as the US auto industry plummeted and many local dealerships closed, we thrived and continued to double our revenue year after year. During that time we added an additional van by acquiring a smaller local company that was going out of business. This additional van allowed us to continue aggressively marketing to other local companies. During the early years we worked at the Motorsports Auto Show in Harrisburg PA, Washington DC and Baltimore MD. Our great performance and ability to detail up to 100 cars in a day helped with our reputation as an up and coming company.

In December of 2009, we decided to partner with Living Social to help gain new customers during the slower winter months. During this first deal we sold 75 vouchers which for a small company like ours were perfect. When we spoke to the Living Social representative he said, “Hopefully next time we can sell 250!” At that time we laughed at that notion because 75 new customers was great for us. That following

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