By the mid-1990s, C Jay’s Custom Auto Accessories was doing well.
The dealership installation network provided a steady stream of work. Car dealers relied on outside installers to add accessories that manufacturers were only beginning to integrate into vehicles. CD changers, alarms, cruise controls, and other upgrades were still largely aftermarket products, and installers like me made a living bringing those systems to life inside vehicles.
One of the most popular products at the time was the Sony CD changer. Demand was enormous. Dealers sold them regularly, and I installed them constantly. For a while it seemed like the work would never slow down.
Then the retail landscape began to change.
Large national electronics chains such as Circuit City and Best Buy were expanding rapidly, and their buying power was unlike anything the independent dealer networks had ever faced. They could purchase inventory in massive quantities directly from manufacturers, often consuming the available supply before smaller distributors even had access to it.
At one point the supply of Sony CD changers one of the most important products for my business simply disappeared.
Dealers still needed installations, and I still had obligations to fulfill. To keep those relationships intact, I began purchasing units at full retail from the big box stores just so I could complete the installations that had already been promised.
It kept the peace with the dealers, but it was not sustainable.
Eventually I made a decision that seemed logical at the time: I placed a very large order to rebuild my inventory once supply became available again.
When the shipment finally arrived, the market changed overnight.
Circuit City and Best Buy slashed their prices, selling the exact same equipment below what I had paid wholesale. The inventory I had purchased to stabilize the business suddenly became a liability.
By the fall of 1999, the financial damage was impossible to ignore.
Years of work building the installation business had been undone by a simple reality of modern retail: when large national chains decide to dominate a market, independent operators often become collateral damage.
It was a hard lesson.
But sometimes the moment everything seems to collapse is also the moment something new begins.
A conversation with a friend during that difficult time would lead me to a place I had never expected to go a website that, in 1999, many people had barely heard of.
eBay.
And that would change everything.