A visit to Moss

By Mark Berry

This summer my family and I took a trip to sunny southern California. During our time there we stopped by Moss Motors in Goleta to see if we could get a look around.

I had contacted Shawn Carlberg, the marketing director at Moss, before leaving Washington to see if we could meet and maybe get a tour of the Moss Motors facility. Shawn assured me that if I swung by someone would be available to show us around.

The company is located in a small suburb of beautiful Santa Barbara, in an old salt and Pepper packaging plant. If you’ve ever had the chance to go to Santa Barbara you know what I’m talking about when I say beautiful!

When we arrived at the Moss facility I inquired to the receptionist as to whether Shawn was available, and was told David Stursma would be right down to meet us. David greeted us and asked what we had in mind for a tour. I said it would be great to just see how the ground floor day to day operation of the company is carried out.

David took us into the warehouse first, where an average of 50,000 parts at any given time are kept ready for shipment. I asked how they know what parts to stock; and the answer obviously was “experience”. Sixty eight years of supplying British car parts has provided Moss with a lot of experience and a lot of industry data! An entire MGB could probably be built with parts Moss keeps in stock right at the warehouse workers finger tips! You may however have to look a little further back on the shelf to locate items for some of the other lower production marques though.

Next we walked through the shipping area and watched how the orders are packaged and processed for shipping. Two people on average work shipments as the order is simultaneously double checked for accuracy by quality control folks.

The orders are taken by a team of around six parts specialists working the phones at any given time. These people are the first line of contact we as customers rely on to take our orders and answer our questions about Moss’s products, their application, and availability. The salespeople go through an extensive training program to learn the ins and outs of Moss’s sales operations and to become the best resource their customers have for keeping these cars on the road. I definitely wasn’t left with the impression that these people are the same type of auto parts store employees you would deal with at a chain store. These people understand that our cars are more than just transportation to us and they strive to provide more than just replacement car parts. They work with several resources to “solve the problem” and help the customer with the best solution for their needs.

The sales team is backed by the technical department. This is a group of highly knowledgeable British automotive experts that can research and provide answers to a multitude of questions ranging from: product originality, quality, application, substitution, etc. Some of these folks were prior shop owners themselves, with some having over 40 years of service at Moss Motors alone!

Finally we walked through one of the coolest areas of the Moss motors facility: the shop! The shop is a garage/ workshop area where new parts can be fitted and tested, parts problems being researched by the tech department can be investigated in situ, and employees can even squeeze in a little work on their own cars!

After seeing the shop, David walked us back to the showroom and exchanged email addresses with me, offering to keep in touch and inviting me to stop by anytime!

Admittedly my impression of Moss motors was not what I was expecting. I thought Moss motors would be a large, busy, mail order corporation that dealt in high volume phone sales, and not at all set up to deal with walk up customers; must less accommodate someone wanting a tour. But none of these assumptions could have been farther from the truth! The kind people at Moss were very inviting and very interested in British automobiles and in the people that keep them on the road. Throughout the entire visit I met happy, friendly, employees who gave me the feeling I was visiting a small business; not what I would expect a business that can claim to be the largest supplier of British automobile parts in the U.S. to feel like.

If you ever find yourself in the Santa Barbara area, I highly recommend stopping by Moss Motors and saying hi! You won’t be sorry you did!