The ’08 catalog is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. How many people and how much time does it take to produce it?
Jamie Meyer: Thanks for the compliment. We really pride ourselves on it. The catalog is still the number one sales tool, although digital marketing is coming up fast. It takes one person from our team that’s dedicated to the project who oversees and manages it for about ten months out of the year. He has an entire agency assigned to that catalog and upwards of eight people that’ll work on it full time for two to three months when it comes down to crunch time, which means the PRI show. Because that’s where we want that catalog out.
How do you decide which products you’ll make or promote? Are there some guidelines for that or is it a historical thing?
Jamie Meyer: There are really two questions here. The first is what parts we make and what parts we market. We actually have a lot of feedback from our dealers and we certainly listen to our customers and what it comes down to is that the marketing team will decide which path we’re going to take with a product and then the engineering team decides how to make it and the two teams will work together. There’s also the product development side of the company that will have to weigh in on what we can and cannot do. The most difficult part of the job is to market time-wise what we think will be available. So for example, you heard about the 427 Anniversary crate engine at SEMA in late October 2007, but that product won’t be available until July of this year. You can’t give up an opportunity to market a halo product at SEMA, the biggest car show in the world, so we have to make sure we time it right from a marketing standpoint.
You know Duntov’s seminal “white paper” that called for GM to make and market things for the new Chevy V8, thus assuring a loyal following in perpetuity. Do you see GMPP as the ultimate expression of that? Or are they two different things?
Jamie Meyer: Yeah, I got a copy of that on my laptop and I refer to it all the time. I think you can easily read into it that Performance Parts and also our Performance Division team [concept vehicles, production vehicles, the SS series, etc., anything that’s a must-have driver] have tried to fulfill Duntov’s dream, but there’s also the production-car side of it so Performance Division and Performance Parts can work together to make opportunities.
What do you want to accomplish on the short-run at GMPP?
Jamie Meyer: If you look at GM as a whole, Performance Parts is a very lucrative part of the business, and that’s largely because we help people fulfill their dreams. I think about cars all the time and I think our customers do, too, and we want to make sure we’re there to help them do whatever they want to do to have fun with a car or off-road vehicle.
How profitable is GM Performance Parts?
Jamie Meyer: I can’t share sales numbers with you, but margin-wise sale of performance parts is on the high end of the automotive spectrum as far as profitability goes. That’s on a unit-by-unit basis so you can read into that what you want.
What did you mess with when you were a little kid? Was it bikes and stuff with wheels or what?
Jamie Meyer: When I was a kid, I was big in the Boy Scouts and one of my Pinewood Derby cars was a state champion. It happened to be a ’78 Trans Am Bandit and like everybody else who grew up in the ‘70s, I idolized Burt Reynolds and that car. Certainly, the Derby car was my first hot rod. Then, I lived in a farm community in upstate New York [Naples, way south of Rochester] so we had motorcycles and my grandfather used to race go-karts so they gave me a little 3hp go-kart that I used to tear up the front yard. I didn’t get a fast car until I graduated high school.
What kind of street cars do you have, Jamie?
Jamie Meyer: My daily driver is a ’06 Trailblazer SS which is just the craziest SUV ever built. I love that thing. It has a Corvette LS2 in it. You guys drag tested one. And I still have some Mustangs left over from my Mustang days. I have a 2003 SVT Cobra that sits at the house with 1,500 miles on it. And I have an ’88 notchback that makes 1,300 horsepower and runs 8.70s which hasn’t been out of the garage in a few years, but I still have that car. Oh, and I’m looking to add a Corvette to my collection this spring.
A ZR1 maybe?
Jamie Meyer: No, not one of those. They don’t pay enough yet. You’ll see when the time is right.
What’s your favorite non-work thing to do?
Jamie Meyer: Other than my family and friends and spending time with them…ah, my father has a vineyard in upstate New York and I love to go home for the Naples Grape Festival when we bring in the harvest and sell two tons of grapes in 1 quart boxes.