Jim Tells The Stories Behind His Five Favorite Products

Premium Body Wash

“When I first started my detail shop Simon’s over 15 years ago, one of the first big name products to disappoint me was the wash soap. It was harsh on cars and just totally drying out at my guys’ hands. They’d be loading up on moisturizer for their hands any chance they could get.

Nowadays you could easily find a better wash soap online, but back then there weren’t a lot of other options. I’ve got a background in chemistry and I love to tinker, so I made my own lab and crafted a gentler soap for both the cars and my guys’ hands.

The secret ingredient ended up being Lanolin, a natural oil that keeps skin soft. My guys were happy with that change, to say the least.”

Leather Cream

“I opened Simon’s in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood with some affluent people, so there’s a lot of higher-end European cars driving around.

When I started offering leather cleaning at Simon’s, a lot of my customers with Porsches were complaining about the leather dressing I was using, even though it was supposed to be the best available.

They hated the greasy, shiny look it was giving the seats. I guess people wanted that look in the 1980s, but now it’s all about a clean matte look.

So I looked at the formulation, and I realized I could make something that didn’t have the silicone or oils that was making it look greasy, AND I could even make it protect and condition the leather by adding UV inhibitors and the lanolin oil I mentioned earlier.”

Formula 1201

“I know it feels like coatings have been around forever now, but back in the late 2000s they weren’t well known and the people that did know them didn’t know a lot.

At my own shop I was trying many kinds of protection products like waxes and sealants, and customers that didn’t know how these products worked were annoyed with how long it was taking.

Through research I started to learn about ceramic nanotechnology, which like I said at the time was pretty new for cars. It sounded amazing, lasting for years instead of months or weeks like sealants and wax.

So I got hands on with this technology, tinkered a bit and formulated a ceramic solution that was working great. The only problem was the car needed to be totally dry to bond to the paint, and drying was taking too long even with pressurized air.

That’s when I realized that you could use the water already on the vehicle from washing as the catalyst for the coating’s bond. That ended up being the breakthrough I needed. My guys were zipping through jobs, washing, rinsing then applying the ceramic coating.

That was when I knew wax and sealants were done for. It was a new day. And what time means a new day? 12:01 AM. That’s where Formula 1201 comes from.”

NSP Z1

“The Dr. Beasley’s line originally had a set of polishes called ‘The Heritage Series’. But the more I tinkered with them, the more I was seeing the limits of polish. They just don’t set up for ceramic coatings well, and trust me I could talk about that all day.

So if you know the story then you know that’s when I came up with Nano Surface Primers. They’re great products for paintwork correction and they set up for ceramic coating perfectly in ways that polish just can’t. But not every job or customer is going to want or need a full correction and ceramic coating application.

That’s why AIOs (all-in-ones, meaning correction AND protection in one product) are so common in detailing shops. I knew if this Nano Surface Primer tech was going to change anything, I needed to have an AIO version.

So I started looking at how AIOs do what they do and engineered a way to adapt that to the Nano Surface Primer technology. Much of it came down to the microsphere abrasive blend, which had to be carefully balanced between abrasive sizes to get scratches out AND finish out. Once the NSP nanogel was also adapted to act as a standalone coating, NSP Z1 was born.”

Nano LS-10

“Nano LS-10 is one of our latest products, and it actually has a story similar to Z1. So as you’ve all seen, ceramic coatings exploded in popularity over the last decade. Of course not everyone is going to want a full-on ceramic coating, so ceramic sprays also exploded in popularity, filling that gap in the market.

It bothered me though when I looked at the ingredients for so many of these sprays. Many were claiming to be genuine ceramic but were not, and that’s not fair to the end user. A spray coating may not be the best protection out there, but if people are going to use them anyway, they should get what they’re paying for.

When it came time to formulate, I had been so focused on multi-stage pro coating systems for so long that it had been awhile since I made something more entry level. That pro-focused perspective ended up helping me though in adapting the technologies from pro ceramic coatings to an easier-to-use spray coating.

Once the formulation was starting to look sound, I immediately took it out on the floor and had the Simon’s team start playing with it. My foreman gave me a lot of good feedback, and that real world experience helped me finally perfect it. Now it’s one of our fastest-selling products!”