In the Summer of 2015, our passion-based Spritely business reached a major fork in the road, when our landlord needed his space back and our Bugeyes became homeless. The Quonset Hut across the street from our shop was for sale though, and while it seemed entirely appropriate to put curvey little cars into a curved building, once the ink dried and the building was mine, I now had a lot of broken cars to restore and a broken 1951 building to restore as well. See photo above… this was a rough hut. 

The home of a glass blowing studio when I came along, 59 North Harbor Street was originally a storage building for the wooden forms for the iron foundry across the street. The metal roof leaked badly. But the foundation was bulletproof and the vibe was right, (or one day would be right, I prayed) so off we went on a massive building rehab project that left Bugeyes and building materials scattered everywhere.

Fast forward to today… our restored Q-hut has now launched 324 Bugeye adventures, for wonderful clients all around the world. We are making a lot of people very happy, drivers and spectators alike. Each one of our cars is an evangelist for a different way to interact with conveyance. Our drivers arrive with a smile, and they are making a lot of other people smile along the way. It has now become quite routine, for example, to be rolling along in the right lane in a Bugeye, while a spectator in the left lane is leaning out the passenger shooting a video to share with friends.

“Look what I saw on the highway today!

These cars touch people’s lives, and we are honored to have the opportunity to make them work better than they did when new. We are currently building a Bugeye for the daughter of a dad who lost his Bugeye in the Paradise fire a few years back. We recently put a Bugeye in the hands of a client whose health challenges accelerated his need to fulfill his bucket list NOW. And we look forward to the next 324 people we have yet to meet whose lives will be similarly transformed.

The Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine piece that just came out (featured here) is an acknowledgment of what we have created, fueled by passion for a wonderful little sportscar that was last manufactured in 1960. We are honored to arrive at this moment in our journey, and we look forward to supporting you on yours.

Thank you for helping us to arrive at this very special moment. And we have a lot more fun and excitement to come!

If you haven’t already seen it, you can read all seven pages of the Hagerty article in the reader below.

The nice folks at The New York Times just published a great story about road-tripping in classic cars, featuring “Ducky” and the Larricks. We’ve included a copy of the article below, but if you would like to view it on The New York Times page, you can do so by clicking here (If you click over to the Times site, you may need to sign up to create a free account.)

This was our greatest reliability run ever, and our team did an awesome job building a car to make this epic 4000 mile trip.

This was a week for celebration. We sold out of all of our Bugeye inventory (but not to worry, we’re replenishing as you can tell from the cars listed above) and “Hagerty Insider” published a fantastic story about life in the Bugeyesphere, with beautiful photos and words by their superb staff of talented people. My Bugeye “Gumby” is featured throughout the story, which seems appropriate given that the car has been insured with Hagerty since about 1980 (I got the car in about 1978).

Click here to read the story and to see more great pictures-don’t miss the 14 picture photo gallery at the end of the story!

“Yuri,” Our 309th Bugeye sold (the one that liquidated our car inventory) sold this week to Nicolas in Belgium, and this was our first to go to Belgium. Our fluency with national and international shipping makes it easier than ever to ship cars all over the world. It will actually cost less to ship a Bugeye in a container to Rotterdam for Nicolas than for us to ship a Bugeye in an enclosed trailer to Seattle, so we expect to serve more international customers in the future even though the USA is still of course our primary market.

It helps that people around the world like what we are doing!

Thanks to all of you who check this site frequently and support our efforts and our growth. We couldn’t do it without all of you, and we are really excited about lies ahead. We have a number of cool new products coming soon to our parts catalog, all designed to solve persistent Bugeye drivability problems. We have lots of new cars coming too, to make sure we can continue to serve those folks looking for a quality British sports car, built with maximum reliability in mind!

Stay tuned!