By J.R. Tidwell
When it comes to cleaning and taking care of a vehicle, there is a huge difference between a car wash, an average detail and a premium detail.
Business partners Anthony Marino and Bret McKissack at Marino’s Premium Detailing at 3521 Vann Road Suite 117 in Trussville are out to show customers just what kind of difference a true premium detail makes on a vehicle.
“We have done cars that have appeared in magazines,” Marino said. “We have done cars that have won awards at shows in Las Vegas. We have done cars for World of Wheels and other shows. We are not your average shop. This is not a four-bay shop where we pull you in and out and hurry up. We spend at least 40 hours.”
“We are a high-end, in-depth detailing shop,” McKissack said. “We have packages for your everyday soccer mom with minivans, but we also go up to show car preparations. That includes the undercarriage, engine bay, mirror, finish paint, stuff like that.”
The amount of work the duo puts into a single vehicle depends on the package, with more information available at www.marinospremiumdetail.com.
“When you take a car to a show it will have every square inch of it looked over,” Marino said. “You have to consider the cleanliness of the vehicle, but you also have to make sure there is no problem with the paint. We work on some cars three or four days straight.
You’re talking about two guys, so we might spend 60 to 100 hours on them. Or you might have a daily driver car that someone wants to get refreshed. We treat every car almost the same. We make sure we give the client what they are paying for. It all comes down to what the client wants.
If the client wants a brand-new car, but they don’t want to buy a brand new one, they just want to take their down payment and make what they have new again, they can go as crazy as they want. Everything we do we do to 110 percent so that way from any angle you look at it, it’s clean.”
“It starts out with our wash work,” McKissack said. “We get the first layer of crud off the vehicle. Depending on that we could spend an hour or three outside just doing the wash work. Then we evaluate from there, including going over the interior. Then we work our way to the exterior. We make sure its decontaminated, then we make sure the paint work is good. We get rid of any scratches, swirls or marring.
Usually by the time we get done with a car the client is coming out better than we are because we put so much attention to detail in our work. Our customers are usually pretty excited about our work.”
Marino and McKissack can work their magic on pretty much anything with a paint job, be it a car, truck, or boat. According to McKissack the pair might even be detailing a plane soon. Either way, it’s their attention to detail that makes their work outshine the competition.
“The quality of our work sets us apart,” Marino said. “We are also passionate about what we do. We’re not in it for the money. A lot of times our packages are more expensive than a regular detail shop, but you get so much more quality, detail and work out of it. We will only do three cars in a busy week.
The most we can do in a week if we are doing bigger packages is two. We have done boats and jet skis to. If it’s got paint we can do it. I am comfortable saying that no one else in the area does things to the depth we do it.”
“We have done cars that could sell for $3,000 all the way up to a hot rod that belongs to a buddy of ours that probably has half a million in it,” McKissack said. “We can do anything from daily drivers to cars on the covers of magazines.”