For 45 years, Colin Edwards of GPI has been one of the repair industry’s truffle hounds for consumables – seeking and finding the next indispensable product that you don’t know how you ever managed without. Sam Street reports.
When Paint and Panel caught up with Colin Edwards at his Mulgrave offices in Victoria, he had just returned from the US show SEMA. The table in his boardroom was covered in samples of fantastic products designed to make life in the bodyshop easier or more profitable.
Edwards’ eyes are alight with a passion for his trade that appears to have burned brighter over the last 35 years rather than diminishing. He first started trading as GPI Automotive Products in 1978.
Edwards actually started out as a menswear salesman in 1958, moving to Melbourne in 1965 and beginning work at General Paper Industries in 1968 as a junior partner. He was then given the job of running a direct van sales operation in order to sell masking tape and other products to bodyshops throughout Australia. Edwards took over the company at the end of 1977.
“The Australian dollar devalued 17.5 per cent in one hit in November 1976, which caused a lot of damage to importers,” he says. “After a year it was then decided that General Paper Industries should cease trading. I made an offer to my partners to take over what was left of the business and on 1 February 1978, I cashed in my superannuation and started GPI Automotive Products.
“I manufactured the first Australian-made lightweight body filler and buff pads in a rented factory in Sunshine with two women, one sewing the buff pads and the other cleaning the buff pads, filling and labelling the cans and doing a bit of office work.
“I changed the direction of the company to only sell to resellers, not product to end users. As the business developed I travelled Australia with my sample suitcases filled with products I had picked up over time, selling my wares.”
GPI started out with two products and two staff. 35 years later it has 4000 stock items, six warehouses – one in each state – and 143 employees.
The business today is not just automotive. He was on a buying trip to Taiwan 20 years ago, and while visiting one of his suppliers he noticed an exercise bike in the corner of the man's office. He told the supplier he was sure he could sell a few and to send 50 over in the next container. Edwards now has a multi-million dollar fitness and bicycle business.
The corporate and promotional business came from Edwards' menswear background, Edwards says. “Back in the eighties when the police brought in roundabouts and drink driving tests, I thought the repair industry could fall back a bit because there would be less accidents.
“I also decided that it would be wise to diversify and by expanding the base of the tree it would be good for the whole business. And it has been – the company has grown year on year, every year for 35 years.”
Edwards took Paint and Panel for a long walk around the huge warehouses behind the office in Mulgrave, each set of racking bulging with product.
“We service most resellers in the refinish market in Australia and we also export to New Zealand and out to SE Asia – the Philippines, Malaysia, Fiji and Indonesia,” he says.
“We import the most widely used masking tape in Australia, we released the Sunmight abrasives range seven years ago and we now supply up to 25 per cent of the refinish market in abrasives and we're constantly growing both with product ranges and in volumes.
“GPI has had a very influential role in the Australian refinish trade. For example I released the first roll of plastic film to Australia. When I started out, spray painters were using newspaper as a masking medium and in the '70s I introduced brown masking paper rolls to the trade.
“I created the first folding workbench, which we've now made for over 15 years. We've sold tens of thousands. Now we have branched out into canned product with our new BodyworX label, which already has 75 products.”
Edwards says GPI's Velocity product range has already picked up an enormous share of the Australian market. “In today's times, if a product will do a job, perform well and is cheaper than opposition products, then end users will buy it.
“We don't bring any products to market that we haven't tested, so we have complete confidence in the product ranges that we release to the Australian market. If you take electrical product, all our products carry the C tick badge – I believe that many opposition products don't have these tests for their product ranges, so there are certain inherent dangers.”
At 72 years of age, Edwards shows no signs of slowing down. He's attended all the major trade shows this year including Automechanika Frankfurt, SEMA and was about to jet off to Automechanika Shanghai when Paint and Panel visited.
He has booked next year's flights to all the shows already, and that's in addition to all of the Australian visits to his branches and their customers.
“I try to spend three days a month in every state to see our branches, see our customers and talk new product. I do love the business; I'm involved with it on a daily basis.
“GPI today has become a generic term for refinish consumable product. We have our Autocart, where our resellers place their orders online and that features over 4000 products for sale. We have 12 GPI guys on the road around Australia calling on resellers every day of the week and we have our Powerpoints rewards program.
“What we've done with our Velocity range is to reduce pricing dramatically, which has helped both the end user and the reseller. We already have over 400 products in our Velocity range. We have an office in Hong Kong and a person based in the north of China involved in purchasing, who also do quality control checks with the manufacturers there.”
Edwards brought out some of the great products he had found as SEMA. “I haven't been in the hand cleaner business for over 25 years but I found a hand cleaner in Frankfurt that will take off anything: two-pack paint, oil, mastics and there's a range of amazing wipes too. There's also some great new nano cleaners to remove the film off a car.
“We keep moving ahead – people see what we do and seek to emulate us. My job is seeking and finding. I understand the market, I understand what will sell. For example we are releasing a whole new range for the SMART repair area, involving Kwasny spray cans.
“There are not many people who have been around the industry as long as I have. I eat and sleep the business because I love it. Nearly every week there's something new surfacing which allows us to pass on its advantages to the industry.”
