By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Customers dropping off cars for detailing are often embarrassed about the condition of their vehicles. The rock hard french fries under the floor mats. The crayons crammed into any crevice possible.
But as far as Dusty and Doug Pendleton are concerned, the dirtier the better.
The couple, who own Retro Detailing in Bowling Green, love a challenge.
“The worse a car is, the greater the transformation,” Dusty said. That sometimes requires peculiar body contortions to get to every cranny in a car. “We are very detail oriented – excuse the pun.”
Dusty Pendleton recently earned a Certificate of Women’s Entrepreneurship from the Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship at Cornell University. And she is the only female certified by the International Detailing Association in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan.
She is accustomed to being the only woman in the room in the male-dominated profession of car detailing. She realizes that some customers prefer dealing with men, and that it’s often tougher for women to get loans. Dusty acknowledged that she probably benefits from her first name being gender neutral.
But Dusty has found that detailing is the perfect career for her. After being flown back and forth to Los Angeles for a decade as a celebrity blogger, she wanted to be home more with her family.
“I drove Uber for a while, until someone threw up in my car,” she said.
Her husband, Doug, grew up in the auto industry, and worked for 20 years for Thayer dealerships.
So in 2019, the husband and wife team started the auto detailing business from their garage. But as their customer base grew, so did their need for more work space – prompting them to move to their current location, at 540 S. Maple St., in 2020.
Retro Detailing provides smoke and odor removal, paint correction, paint protection, interior deep cleaning, ceramic coatings, headlight restoration, leather protection, wheel coatings, and more.
Though far from interviewing celebrities, the work suits Dusty.
“It is quite a leap,” she said. But with Doug’s strengths in automotive, and her skills in marketing, the business clicks. “We’re a really good team.”
The work is very physical, especially the polishing. It requires an eye for detail and a great deal of patience.
“Our goal is to bring a vehicle in and make it look as close to new as possible,” Dusty said.
Frequently, the couple hears from customers who were thinking about selling their vehicles but end up wanting to keep them after the Pendletons take off years of wear.
“We can do some really cool miracles,” she said.
“It’s the transformation” that is thrilling, Doug said.
And as for customers who are apologetic about the state of their vehicles when they drop them off for detailing – don’t worry.
“We find some incredibly strange things,” Dusty said, listing off the maggots, cockroaches, and inches of tobacco juice from a spittoon overturning on the floor. Then there was a stale buttermilk biscuit so covered with dog hair, that she thought it was a small animal.
“If you don’t have maggots or cockroaches, you are ahead of the game,” Dusty said.
