Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rick Weber

“You can walk into any Auto Zone, Pep Boys, or O'Reilly and buy a grille guard or bumper. But most of those offerings are typically the same unit — just a multitude of different bracket kits and hardware kits to install them. One grille guard might fit a half-dozen different vehicles. But with the Ranch Hand line — and this always has been appealing to me, coming from a fabrication background — all of our units are vehicle year-, make-, and model-specific. There's no drilling, no welding, very little bracketry. Everything is built as a one-piece welded unit. All come with hardware instruction sheets that are very user-friendly, so your average do-it-yourselfer can do it in his driveway with the aid of a friend.

“But that being said, the pieces are vehicle-specific. There are no modifications that have to be done and no warranty issues to be concerned with on a new vehicle. For example, if you buy a grille guard and decide to sell the vehicle two years later, and your buddy wants your grille guard for his same-model truck, you can take it off your truck and put it on his.”

Plenty of parts

Sawyer says his outlet has almost $500,000 in inventory at any time. He says that given the outlet's size and the amount of dress-up items it buys from outside manufacturers, if there is a product it doesn't have on its shelves, it can obtain it in one or two days.

In the warehouse, Sawyer takes the visitor to the upstairs balcony where Ranch Hand stores most of the buyout components it obtains from other manufacturers. He says the corporate office tracks the highly sought performance-related items so that they are usually in stock — items such as bedliners, suspension kits, shocks, winches, goosenecks, fifth-wheel hitches, toolboxes, and nerf bars.

“I think what sets us apart is that not only do we carry those product lines, but we are actually a legitimate, authorized vendor of that product, so you're not paying a middleman,” he says. “We can squash any issues within days, not weeks.”

Down below, he strolls past a large area of grille guards and points to one of the part numbers: GGF07HBL1. It's a grille guard for a 2007 Ford half-ton.

“We literally have hundreds of parts numbers of pre-existing parts we manufacture,” he says. “Each year, we add about 10 to 15 new offerings. Ford Super Duty is one of the stronger trucks we see a lot of. For instance, all of the products may have stayed the same between '99 and '04, and they may have stayed the same from '05 to '07. Now, from '08, we don't know how long that's going to stay the same. So any time the variance comes into play — even the smallest details of different-style headlights — our product is going to be revamped for that particular vehicle because every part is unique to that vehicle. There's no one-product-fits-all by any means.”

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