OTR dealer St. Louis Wholesale celebrates milestone

ST. LOUIS — St. Louis Wholesale Tire Inc. certainly has had enough seminal moments in its four decades of operation to fill a warehouse.

There was the pivot to ATV tires. The move from its original building to a bigger building. Another move to the current facility. Ownership changes. And, of course, the decision to offer an exclusive brand of tires.

St. Louis Wholesale, still known within the industry as the go-to place for oddball, hard-to-find products and inner tubes, now describes itself as a nationwide distributor of agricultural, industrial and specialty tires, with a nod to its oddball niche past.

If there is one recurring theme in each chapter of the St. Louis Wholesale story, it's this: Building relationships.

"Through those first years and to now, it's been relationships that have been the key to our success," St. Louis Wholesale Tire CEO Joe Inchiostro told Tire Business.

"Nobody appreciates business more than us," Operations Manager John Inchiostro said.

And business is booming: the company has grown sales 23% each of the last three years. In 2000, sales were $3 million. Six years later, sales doubled. And in 2022, sales reached $25 million.

That's a chunk of specialty tires.

As the company celebrates its 40th anniversary — the wholesaler officially incorporated in 1984 — the Inchiostro cousins note that the founding of the wholesale business they oversee revolved around the strong relationship of their fathers, brothers Joe and Larry Inchiostro.

The brothers, sons of a Sicilian immigrant who came to the U.S. in the 1930s, had been working together at Tire Mart in the St. Louis area for a decade. When things went sour with management, they came to one conclusion: They could do it better themselves.

Joe, who died in April, 2019, and Larry, who will turn 82 in December, leveraged everything they owned, including property in mid-Missouri, to secure loans and lines of credit to start the business out of Joe's home.

"They thought, 'We can be in control of our destiny.' So they had the courage and the fortitude and the will to go out on their own and take a chance," the younger Joe said. "It really is, in my mind ... a true American success story."

The relationship between the brothers was one of the early building blocks of their success: They had served in the Army together; they lived on the family farm, 300 yards from each other; and they saw each other every day.

"They were best friends," Joe said. "I'm sure they had arguments, but we never heard about them."

The relationship with customers was just as important. They sold products on consignment, trusting customers to pay as they could, in the process building a strong bond of trust.

"They got started on a handshake basically," John said.

Joe said they'd tell customers they would be more worried about paying them back than the Inchiostros would be worried about getting paid.

"So because of that relationship that they developed, we got an extra leg up in a time when the industry was quite a bit different," Joe said.

In the early years, the brothers were trying to find their niche.

"They were like two cowboys in the wild, wild West in the tire business, slinging rubber out the back of their wagon," Joe said. "They were buying and selling and hustling."

At the time the business started, Joe said many original equipment manufacturers were switching to radial construction and ag tires. With a vast understanding of the industry, Larry was able to use his industry relationships to find and purchase many clearance, dump lists and overstock products.

"They had the stomach and fortitude, the will to buy all this product and have avenues and outlets to sell it," Joe said, noting the demand for bias tires remains.

"That knowledge was where the concept of oddball, hard-to-find was born, because we had all the weird stuff that no one could find anymore and didn't know how to get," Joe said. "So that became the cornerstone of our original marketing philosophy."

The brothers initially operated out of Joe's apartment. They also rented space at a nearby shopping mall. Soon, they had rented — and filled — 20,000 square feet of space in a nearby building. Then another floor. And another.

John joined the company in 1985, fresh out of high school. By 1991, the family had bought their first facility.

That 60,000-sq.-ft. building was so big, the senior Joe wanted to put a basketball hoop up on the second floor.

"I remember thinking, 'We'll never fill this up,'" the younger Joe said. "... thinking we had all this space. It's true in the tire business: No matter how much space you have, you're going to fill it up."

The younger Joe joined St. Louis Wholesale in 2000 after finishing college to oversee sales and marketing.

The cousins soon realized that the oddball, hard-to-find niche St. Louis Wholesale had filled was not sustainable for future growth.

"(To tell customers), 'Call me when you need something weird' is great, but it's not what we need," Joe said.

The Inchiostros determined they needed to reinvent themselves.

"The key to our success over the years is our ability to identify trends in market ahead of time and reinvent ourselves and position ourselves to capitalize on them. Everything in business has a lifecycle," Joe said.

"If you don't figure out a way to reinvent your image or your relevance in the market, you go into decline, so you have to figure out a way to adapt."

That's when the firm embraced the all-terrain vehicle (ATV) market, identifying that as a huge growth segment. It was at about that time, Joe said, when the four-wheel ATVs began to replace three-wheelers, becoming more of a common application for farmers, ranchers and miners, among others.

In order to generate awareness for the move, St. Louis Wholesale created an ATV bible, detailing sizes and treads for the market. It was mailed to 8,000 customers eager to find a cost-effective alternative for replacement ATV tires from powersports companies.

St. Louis Wholesale also initiated dealer programs for specialty tires and innertubes, and began to increase its presence in agriculture.

"That also was about the time that big regional wholesalers started to do delivery on a daily basis," Joe said. "That became a huge challenge for us, because why would (a customer) come down and pick it up from (us) when (another wholesaler) can deliver it three times a day?

"We've got to carry products that they don't carry or find products from us that they'll do the delivery for. So we had to move to the open space with commodities that were not saturated."

Joe and John Inchiostro bought the business from their fathers in 2006. Three years later, St. Louis Wholesale was "maxed out" with inventory, Joe said. When a building down the street became available, they pounced.

"We could either grow, move to keep growing, or stop growing because we can no longer do more business in this facility," Joe said. "... If you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards, and we're too young to cash out."

They took what they learned from the old building and improved upon it.

"(The building) really has allowed us to move a ton of product with minimal carrying cost, minimal overhead, minimal labor because we have great a logistical system figured out through the trial and error of those years," Joe said.

As some of the bigger wholesalers began to offer specialty tires, the St. Louis Wholesale team decided it was time to zag again.

The result: developing its own line of products (Airloc, for ATV, lawn and garden, and trailer applications) and an exclusivity deal for another brand (Starmaxx, for ag and industrial tires). The factory-direct dealer programs tied to those products have grown 200% to 300% year-over-year since they began in 2020.

Today, Joe said, the company focuses on quality while staying true to the firm's oddball, hard-to-find roots.

"Where the big box wholesaler maybe only carries the top 20% of any given line, we're going to carry the top 80%, so we have a wider breadth and depth of specialty product," Joe said.

Being centrally located, the firm can distribute to any given point within three to five days, sometimes the next day.

"We worked on building a portfolio that is exclusive to us. ... If everyone has it, it's just a price battle, but if there is limited distribution, it becomes more of a value product, and that's our goal.

"By partnering with large independent wholesalers and the independent buying groups, that's how we plan to continue this growth trend for the last 20 years."

The priority today is to build an internal team that can support growth while maintaining the fill rate, quality and service.

Joe said the strategy is like war: Expand, consolidate, repeat.

"If you extend too far from home, you can be cut off in the center," he said. "Realizing our first loyalty is to our existing customers who have helped us get to where we are, we are realigning inventory levels, dealing with pricing as freight costs level off, and making sure we're competitive and building that next tier of managers beneath John and I that will help us maintain our level of quality and service as we grow into the future."

A new location, as well as a new warehouse or two — Savannah, Ga., and/or Salt Lake City are prime warehouse candidates — are under strong consideration in the next few years.

The next chapter in the St. Louis Wholesale story will feature a familiar theme: relationships.

"We value people over profit," Joe said. "We're going to be here for a long time. We're a solid strong source of supply that is dedicated to independent tire dealers, and we are completely focused on helping them grow."

Their customers, Joe and John said, are their friends.

"That level of personal relationship is not just business to us," Joe said. "We still love the smell of tires in the morning when we walk in here. We love the people in industry. It's not business to us. It's our livelihood. It's our life. These people are our friends, and we carry that through."