“I see my work all the time,” said Toby Davis. “If I went out to the parking lot at Belk and walked around, about every third car would have my stripe on it. I can just tell the ones I’ve done.”
Davis, a resident of Starkville, has worked putting striping and accessories on cars ever since he was a teenager. Over the years, his business has worked with dealerships large and small as well as body shops.
His father started the business.
“We were the first striping business in northeast Mississippi,” he said. “He would go around to the big towns and the little towns and try to find business, and after a while he was busy with Tupelo, Columbus, Grenada, Meridian. He didn’t have time for the little towns anymore.”
When he was an eleventh-grader Davis got recruited to handle his father’s clients in small towns.
“They had this program where you worked half a day and went to school half a day, and I started doing that,” he said. “I would go to Aberdeen and West Point and Okolona and the smaller towns.”
Davis said his dad got “burned out” after about seven years and turned the business over to him.
“In 1983 I was 20 years old and he turned it over to me and said, ‘You do it,’” Davis said. “I’ve been doing it full time since then.”
Davis’ business – Davis Auto Trim Inc. – is just him and his wife, Robin.
“We’ve been married since I was 24,” he said. “Without her I probably still wouldn’t be doing it. I can’t stand the paperwork, the billing, but she’s good at it. She takes care of all those details… I just go around to dealerships and body shops.”
Davis mostly works out of his van, driving a circuit across the state: Grenada and Greenwood on Monday, West Point and Columbus on Tuesday, Tupelo on Wednesday, Amory “and a lot of times back to Tupelo” on Thursday and back to Columbus on Friday, he explained.
A basic, simple pinstripe on a car takes about five or 10 minutes, he said, but putting on rally stripes – thicker stripes that typically run over the hood and roof of a car – takes several hours and requires a lot more work.
“I work on site,” he said. “I have everything in my van. I just go to the dealer and do it there. If the weather’s good I do it outside, if it’s raining or really cold I go inside. If they don’t have anywhere to get in I can’t work if the weather’s bad.”
The weather plays a major role, he said.
“I can remember a dealership in Tupelo, I think I striped 80 cars in one day,” he said. “It was just perfect weather. If it’s cold or rainy, I can do maybe 15, and that’s working hard.”
Heat has to be compensated for, as well, he said.
“If you’ve got a black car sitting outside, the sun’s hitting one side, and that side is probably 150 degrees and the other is probably 90,” he said. “You’ve got to pull it on the shade, spray some water on it to cool it down. I can clean and stripe the cool side while the hot side is cooling down.”
On a typical day Davis said he does around 30 pinstripes. Rally stripes he can usually do two a day “and just make a day of it.”
Davis said the market has changed a good bit.
“It’s slower now because dealers aren’t getting the inventory,” he said. “…The last couple of years with factories shutting down for COVID-19 there’s times where they’re getting hardly anything in.”
He said he thought the business would be a hard one to break into today.
“When we first started out, there was no such thing as a dealer satisfaction index,” he said. “Now they have to know you’re going to do a good job. If you’re starting from scratch and they didn’t know you and didn’t trust you they probably wouldn’t want you to put stripes on their cars.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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