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Cars
 Rims put industry in a spin
By Keith Reed, Globe Staff | November 7, 2004
At any stoplight, you'll see them: big, gleaming rims, spinning like they forgot to brake with the rest of the car. They come in all kinds of flashy styles, mostly in diameters of 20 inches or more, and are the rage among the urban car-customizing crowd, hip-hoppers, and professional athletes.
And while they might look like the brainchild of some Detroit design guru, they were invented by a team of locals who left lucrative jobs and trusted their futures to a homework assignment. Today, Davin Wheels is a multimillion dollar company in Providence, holding the only patent in the United States for a spinning wheel. "We scraped up $5,000 between the three of us to do it," said David Fowlkes Jr., Davin's president. Now 34, Fowlkes was a 20-year-old student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design when he first sketched and made a model of the wheels that would make him and partners Hank Seemore, 43, and Ian Hardman, 39, car-customizing pioneers. "I said it'd be kind of cool to create a wheel where it looked like the car was still moving once it stopped. It was for a class project," Fowlkes said. By 1998, Fowlkes was a designer for Reebok and had that first spinner model sitting in his Braintree apartment. Hardman, now Davin's chief executive, was a Reebok marketing executive at the time. Seemore's wife worked at the company, as well. It wasn't long before the trio discussed going into business together, meeting nights and weekends and concocting all sorts of companies -- from board games to dot-com start-ups. Then Fowlkes remembered the decade-old spinning wheel he still had from college. "I pulled it out of the box and Hank got all giddy like, 'We're going to make some money,' " he said. That year, Davin (pronounced DAW-vin), was formed. The company, which got a jump start thanks to a $250,000 loan from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp., was named by Fowlkes, who said the word has Greek and Latin roots. "It means of the heavens," Hardman said. "When they see our product, we want them to have an emotional or almost spiritual response." The team contacted a manufacturer and had a prototype made. But their first marketing success came by accident in a Los Angeles parking lot. "We were out there to try some on a Lincoln Navigator, and we stopped to get food at about 2 o'clock in the morning," Fowlkes said. "Before we knew it, people were surrounding the car, pointing and staring. We knew we had something big." The wheels, manufactured in a company-owned plant in Norwalk, Calif., are made by heating solid chrome to the point it is almost molten, shaping it, and then allowing it to cool. The built-in "spinners" are essentially an outer layer of chrome that floats over the main rim and spins with the help of ball bearings between it and the wheel's hub. The Davin partners would not disclose annual revenues, but their wheels sell for between $6,000 and $15,000 a set. Published reports in the trade journal Tire Business estimated last year's sales at about $8.5 million. Davin may have the patent on spinning wheels, but that hasn't stopped dozens of other companies. Basketball star Latrell Sprewell has his own line of spinning wheels, and cheap spinning hubcaps are available at warehouse outlets for as little as $20 a set. Davin's success hasn't changed the partners' work ethic, though. Seemore, who lives in Dorchester with his wife, said the three still spend much of their time planning products, reviewing revenue projections, and talking to sales people who hawk their rims to high-end car shops and celebrities. A few things have changed, though. Seemore, who used to drive an old Hyundai back and forth to his job at the bank, now rolls a 2002 Chevrolet Tahoe SUV, with 24-inch Davin wheels. Hardman recently bought a 2004 Range Rover with 22-inch wheels from Davin's Revolution 6.0 line. But it's Fowlkes who is the real car nut of the bunch. His current car is a 2005 Dodge Magnum RT, with 22-inch Davin Speed rims. "There is a strategy behind what I do and what I purchase," he said, noting that every one of the cars was fitted with Davin wheels, making his own cars rolling billboards for his company. Keith Reed can be reached at reed@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. |
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