'Skin care for your car'

World's Best car wax impresses discerning eBay crowd

By P.J. HARSTON

A sampling of World's Best Wax products: From the left, auto wax, shampoo, pre-wax treatment, and exterior enhancer.

Frank Duarte sounds surprised -- and he probably is.

He's the president of World's Best Wax, a Toronto-based company that's hit on a new formula of car wax that contains a higher-than-standard amount of carnauba wax. Carnauba is the stuff in car wax that protects a vehicle's finish.

But Duarte's company didn't stop with the wax -- it kept going, working almost as hard on the packaging and how the product is marketed.

"When we first packaged it, it looked cheap," he said, with emphasis on the "cheap."

"It looked like we should slap a '40% MORE' on the side of it somewhere -- it was awful."

SLEEK STYLINGS

Now it looks like it belongs in a finer hair salon, amongst the hoity-toity shampoos and spritzers.

"We've got that Euro-thing going for us. Style, sleek, beautiful. And you know what? Isn't that how you want your car to look?"

Then he and his crew hit the North American car-club circuits to see if they could make some marketing inroads.

Duarte's product has expensive, all-natural ingredients in it, so it's not what you're going to find on the hardware store shelves. It's going to cost more, too.

"We started giving people a chance to try it. We knew it was a good product, but we needed to get it into people's hands and on their cars," he said.

That's old school. It worked nominally and word of mouth began to build.

Then the eBay store was set up.

"You can't lie on eBay," says Duarte. "It is what it is and people will let you and everyone else in the world know if it does what it says it does."

Online car forums began discussing his wax and then things really heated up.

"And women! Women were buying it and trying it out and passing along how much they loved it to all their friends online -- it's just been phenomenal," said Duarte.

"Now I like to think of it this way -- this is almost like skin care for your car!"

He also mentioned his natural car wax is easy on the environment.

"Ours is so environmental, you have to keep it in the fridge. I'm not kidding," he says.

Duarte has a tiger by the tail, for sure -- but I'm not sure he knows quite how he got there.

photo courtesy of World's Best Wax

A sampling of World's Best Wax products: From the left, auto wax, shampoo, pre-wax treatment, and exterior enhancer.

Previous story: Quick Money Sunflashes
Next story: Limited cash requires a plan