Have you ever wondered how aftermarket companies come up with new stuff? New products don’t just appear from thin air, and there are no vending machines full of ideas. We were recently kicking tires with Frank and Terry Zupan of Zoops Products and got on the subject of product development. Our timing couldn’t have been better; they were developing a set of custom headlights and invited us over for a demonstration.
The Zupan brothers, along with their respective sons, Frank Jr. (Frankie) and Terry Jr. (TJ) run the business together and all share in the product-development process. The elder Zupans are both tool-and-die makers by trade and have 35 years of experience behind them. They typically hand-machine a rough prototype, which then gets passed around for a week or two until everyone has a chance to critique it. Then changes are made until a final design is achieved. This final design is again hand-machined by one of the seniors, then handed over to one of the junior Zupans, who go about producing the piece on a CNC mill.
Frank Sr. made himself available for this story, but it just as easily could have been Terry Sr. making the cuts. Frank told us he usually begins the process in his head. As an accomplished tool-and-die maker, he thinks in three dimensions, and when he decided that a trick set of headlights was in order for the Zoops Coupe project they had under construction, he quickly realized that there weren’t many custom headlights on the market. Frank says recognizing a need in the market is the first step in coming up with a new product. Once the need is identified, Zupan has to figure out how to make the part as inexpensively as he can to keep the retail price as low as possible for the consumer.
Interestingly enough, Zupan solves most of his problems in his sleep, “My brain works best when it’s relaxed. The pressures of the day are off and I can think around corners that normally elude me.” During one of his nighttime brainstorms, he realized he had a forging in his inventory that would lend itself perfectly to the headlight he wanted to build. The following day, he started taking some measurements and hand-machining new parts. Take a look at how he does it.
