West Coast Customs
Design meets a moment in car culture.
2004–2011
The project
- Discipline
- Website, UX, UI, photography, social & events
- Year
- 2004–2011
The most famous custom car company in the world. Stars of Pimp My Ride, Street Customs, and Inside West Coast Customs. WCC built some of the wildest cars on TV and became a powerhouse in automotive entertainment.
This one’s different. We’re time travelling. Because this gig changed everything for me.
I was 18, running my first design business, Engine4. A client flew me to Vegas to play in their hockey tourney, and someone mentioned a custom car shop in LA that was starting to get traction. I made my first cold call ever... and landed them.
Before Pimp My Ride blew up, I became WCC’s digital guy, designing their site, helping with marketing, and learning on the fly. When celebrity clients like Shaq started showing up, MTV came knocking. The show exploded. Xzibit hosted. People brought in beat-up junkers and left with cars full of fishtanks and Xboxes.
Over the next 8 years, I built a tight relationship with Ryan, the founder. I flew from New Zealand to LA every few months, helped grow the brand, designed for collabs with clothing labels and electronics companies. Everyone wanted a piece of WCC.
Eventually, creative tension with MTV producers boiled over. The builds got too ridiculous, and it wasn’t aligning with where Ryan wanted to take the brand. WCC walked away from the show (worthy to note WCC saw zero dollars from syndication, ever), opened a huge new shop in Corona, and partnered with Discovery and later TLC to launch Street Customs and Inside West Coast Customs.
By then, I was juggling a website with 4 million monthly visitors, making the odd MTV cameo, running social before “social media” was even a thing (shoutout MySpace), and touring through Europe with the crew.
Looking back
This project taught me more about marketing and storytelling than any degree ever could.
It was raw, chaotic, and full of lessons: creative problem solving at a massive scale. That website and brand content fed my agency pipeline for years.
Looking back now (especially after seeing it pop up on Weird History), I’m proud to have helped build that moment in pop culture. And stoked to see Ryan still crushing it in Burbank, no pool tables in cars this time.
And yup… most of this video below is true, but that's not even the half of it.
