Legend PPF has been in the U.S. market since October 2019, but we think we can still call it a “new” addition to the market. Its creator however, Dr. Tim Gerasimov, a polymer chemist, is an industry veteran who created window film and PPF decades ago for other industry suppliers. The success of the product so far, is perhaps a testament to the power of social media and good-old word of mouth.
The fact that we are not new to industry helps a lot, says Dr. Gerasimov. His new company Bluegrass Protective Films, was formed with other chemists and engineers who Dr. Gerasimov says all have more than 100 years combined experience in the market.
“When we started last fall, a lot of potential customers said, ‘We never heard about you,’ but after a few months the word was spreading on social media,” he said, adding that some who sold PPF were willing to try it. “All of this is good publicity,” he adds.
It didn’t hurt when Ron Harris of the PPF Academy stumbled on the film and tried it out on social media and gave positive reviews.
“We got calls on our sales lines from people who we never approached,”’ says Kurtis Mishler, vice president of marketing and sales.
Though the growth has been positive, when COVID-19 hit, it certainly wasn’t good news for any supplier, though Dr. Gerasimov, says the company did put measures in place to be prepared as far as raw materials and that definitely helped.
“But in April there was a lot of fear in the country in general,” he says. “A lot of installers shut down because they couldn’t justify being essential. Then people started losing jobs, so they aren’t looking at PPF and PPF is also related to car sales so April was a scary month. But in May we saw rejuvenation on that side of the industry and our sales domestically doubled month after month as people got cabin fever and started looking into window film and PPF.”
For more on this story, see the upcoming all issue of PPFMag.
