Mail Order Lessons From a Man Who Sold to 1.2 Million Customers

Jeff Leonard couldn’t find carpet for his 1967 Camaro Rally Sport. Nobody was making it — the car was only ten years old at the time, and nobody thought of a decade-old Camaro as a classic yet.

He asked ten friends for $10,000 in exchange for half the business. Every one of them said no. A bank manager turned him down for the same $10,000 because he had no collateral. So he went back the next day and asked for $20,000 instead, put half of it in a passbook account as collateral against the other half, and walked out with the money.

Four decades later, Classic Industries has served more than 1.2 million customers, anchors a group that includes OER Manufacturing, Parts Unlimited Interiors, The Parts Place, and the Yenko trademark — and has never had a down year.

In this episode, Jeff sits down with Justin Cesler and Dr. Jamie Meyer for a rare look at how the business actually works: the tooling math behind the part that set the strategy for everything after, why he still prints 700-page catalogs and how he measures their return, what he looks for when he buys a company, and where he thinks the restoration market goes from here.

What we get into

The part that taught him the model. A convertible top boot clip for 1967-69 Camaro and Firebird. GM discontinued it, it was made of plastic soft enough to break every time you removed it, and a car needed sixteen of them. Tooling cost $10,000 he was sweating. The parts cost about ten cents each and sold for three or four dollars. The tooling paid off in roughly thirty days, and from then on the rule was simple: find the parts people need where the volume is real, and go make them.

Why the catalogs still exist. Classic Industries runs about a dozen printed catalogs across its premier lines, some of them 600 to 700 pages. Jeff tracks them with a matchback report — every mailing gets checked against orders 90 to 120 days later to see whether it still makes sense. It does. And the catalogs are fully digitized on the site, searchable, with every item linking through to a live price.

The attribution trap. Roughly 65-70% of orders come through the website, but Jeff’s position is that you can’t cleanly separate catalog sales from web sales because the catalog drives the web order. His broader argument: run everything you can afford to run. The channels with one-to-one attribution are the ones people get addicted to, and the ones doing the heavy lifting are usually the ones that are hardest to measure.

How he evaluates an acquisition. Usually a company he already buys from, often with ownership approaching retirement. What makes it interesting is proprietary product or expensive tooling — because remaking 30-year-old tooling costs far more than buying the company that owns it. What he finds inside is almost always the same: no handle on inventory, an archaic system, and people who want the change more than the owner expected.

AI, and what it’s actually good for. Classic Industries is finishing a chatbot trained on its own SKUs, long descriptions, fitment data, and installation PDFs. Jeff’s take on general-purpose AI for parts: he asked one for a headliner for a 74 Nova and got the wrong answer, because it was pulling from bad data on the open web. The moat isn’t the model. It’s whether your own data is clean enough to build on.

Hiring, honestly. New phone staff go through a two-week class before they’re allowed to take a call. Six to eight people start it. Classic Industries is lucky to have one left at the end — and that person still might not work out.

Leadership. “I am not an expert in anything.” Jeff’s answer is that the best thing he ever did was hire people who knew more than he did about whatever he was trying to accomplish, and then keep them. Some have been with the company more than 30 years. His read on why: you can’t be a bad boss and hold people that long.

Where it goes next. Resto Mod. Jeff sees the split between owners who want factory-correct and owners who want the car to be theirs, and he’s putting the company’s attention on the second group. He also lays out how he reads which vehicles get restored next, why production numbers govern what’s worth reproducing, and what he watches at auction.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Ten friends said no
• 1:04 — Introducing Jeff Leonard
• 3:29 — Growing up on Woodward and Ten Mile
• 4:27 — Learning mail order in Madison Heights
• 5:05 — The ‘67 Camaro that started everything
• 8:22 — Getting inside GM’s licensing program
• 11:13 — First principles of a mail order business
• 14:15 — The carpet, the capital, and the credit cards
• 17:49 — The $20,000 loan trick
• 19:38 — Building the first catalog on a Remington typewriter
• 20:49 — Running the whole company on cash flow
• 21:16 — The convertible top clip that changed the business
• 26:26 — Expanding from Camaro to Firebird to Mopar and Ford
• 28:05 — Why aftermarket companies should watch new car trends
• 31:36 — The Hot Rod ad and 600 letters a day
• 33:48 — Rolodex cards, floppy disks, and a homegrown ERP
• 35:47 — Why Classic Industries still prints catalogs
• 38:37 — Matchback reports and print attribution
• 40:40 — The most effective way to market restoration parts
• 43:56 — How Jeff evaluates an acquisition
• 48:14 — Every company under the umbrella
• 49:43 — California, and the case for an East Coast warehouse
• 52:47 — AI, chatbots, and why data quality is the moat
• 58:19 — Never a down year
• 1:01:07 — If you’re starting today
• 1:02:14 — The hiring problem nobody has solved
• 1:05:12 — Leadership: hire people who know more than you
• 1:06:35 — Resto Mod is the future
• 1:09:35 — GM, Ford, and Stellantis
• 1:12:46 — The legacy

Jeff Leonard is the founder of Classic Industries — classicindustries.com