There’s little doubt that the explosive growth of online sellers has given local retailing a run for its money. Still, while big sellers such as Amazon can be tough competitors, they can’t completely drive traditional brick-and-mortar stores out of business. That’s because local retail outlets have several inherent advantages that the big guys can never match.

Harold Hunt, owner of SuperATV in Madison, Indiana, is a motorsports enthusiast, and he instills that same passion in the people he hires. They aren’t just clerks; they go out on the weekends and ride so that they can come back to the shop and relate their product knowledge and experience to customers.

Spartan 4x4, which caters to the youth off-road market, was founded in 2015 by 17-year-old Robert Bowden III out of his parents’ garage in Atlanta. In 2017, Bowden relocated to a 600-sq.-ft. office in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Now 21 and an entrepreneurship major at Western Kentucky University, he expanded yet again in March to a 1,000-sq.-ft. facility with six employees and moved to a 6,000-sq.-ft. facility in July, which houses an office, a shop and a showroom—all under one roof. We recently interviewed Bowden about his progress.

Del Amo Motorsports’ humble beginnings can be traced back to 1985 in a 6,000-sq.-ft. facility in Redondo Beach, California, offering a single product line. The company now features multiple product offerings across a wide spectrum of machines in four locations throughout Southern California, with the original one now encompassing 45,000 sq. ft.

Collin Hadley is a planner. He started Maximum Elevation Off-Road (MEO) with the goal of growing his shop into a nationally recognized brand. SEMA News caught up with Hadley as MEO was completing its move to a new, 8,000-sq.-ft. space. There, MEO will continue its mission to bring the polished customer experience of a Mercedes-Benz service department to the off-road community.

Many entrepreneurs will tell you that they started from the ground up. In the case of Darren Robinson, that means everything you might hope it would. Born in England, he traveled across the ocean and got married in the United States, but he hit a bad patch in the late ’00s when his wife left him and he became homeless. His only possession of value was a decade-old Pontiac Firebird. He was stuck in a foreign country with no home and nor job. The year was 2010, and the American heartland was in deep recession. This is the story of how he persevered to build a successful retail operation.

Cap World is a SEMA-member company specializing in truck caps, truck trailers and other truck accessories—or, as the company’s website proclaims, “everything but the truck.” Alongside a recent 30-year anniversary milestone came recognition from the Light Truck Accessory Alliance (LTAA), as Cap World was named Retailer of the Year for 2015. Each of those accomplishments explains how Cap World has stood out as a retail success story.

Before opening a brick-and-mortar retail location in 2014, Derek Dobson, owner and managing partner of Dale’s Super Store, traveled to swap meets up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest to sell aftermarket performance truck parts and accessories. Now operating out of a 2,200-sq.-ft. facility in Bradenton, Florida, Dobson has four fulltime employees, including himself, and one part-time employee, and he is in the process of expanding into a new 7,000-sq.-ft. building in Bradenton.

Located in Covina, California, Bert’s Mega Mall has a celebrated reputation as the nation’s largest powersports super store. Originally a bicycle retailer, it was bought in 1958 by Ed Seidner, who kept the Bert’s name because he couldn’t afford to change the signage and business cards at the time. Soon Seidner was adding motorcycles to his inventory, becoming one of California’s first Yamaha franchises.

A longtime passion for off-roading helped motivate the Richmond family to launch Southern Off-Road Specialists (SORS) in 2000.