Yahoo Autos Minnesota Chevy Dealer Gins Up Retro-Themed Silverados
When Blake Greenfield took a green, 70,000-mile, 2014 Silverado in trade at his small Chevrolet dealership in Wells, Minnesota, his salesmen razzed him that the truck would be tough to move. The color wasn’t particularly desirable in the area surrounding the town of fewer than 2500 residents, and Greenfield figured they were right. Then he thought of two things: his own surname, and a 1973 Chevy truck that his father had owned when Blake was a kid growing up in Iowa.
The first part was simple. “In all of our advertising,” explains Greenfield, “we try to use the color green.” The second part, inspired by his dad’s old red-and-white pickup, took a little more know-how and imagination. His cousin Ray owns a vinyl shop and wound up spending hours looking at trucks, taking measurements from photos of old two-tone “Squarebody” C/K Chevy pickups of the ’70s and ’80s, and figuring out how the classic scheme might apply to a modern Silverado.
To go along with Ray’s design handiwork, Greenfield and his crew added a lift kit, sourced some wagon-style wheels that’d evoke the period in question, tacked on Cheyenne Super 10 and Big 10 labels like those worn by the Big 10 special edition Chevy pickup of the late 1970s, and added chrome door handles and mirror caps. But they still weren’t entirely sure what the finished product was going to look like until the truck rolled out of Ray’s workshop back in December of last year with the vinyl applied to the truck’s flanks. Everyone at Blake Greenfield Chevrolet Buick loved the truck, and Greenfield figured it’d make him stand out around town and perhaps attract some business into his store.
It turned out to be a little more than that. When photos taken by a local found their way onto the internet, Greenfield’s phone began ringing. The friendly Midwesterner still seems taken aback by the reaction. “It seemed like it went viral almost overnight. We had calls from all over the U.S.” Since then, trucks-done both with vinyl applique and actual two-tone paint jobs-have gone out to far-flung locations such as Texas (naturally), New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Arkansas. Two Silverados currently undergoing the conversion are both destined to stay home in Minnesota, though. Greenfield is pretty sure they’re the twelfth and thirteenth examples to be built since the calls began.
And just in case you’d care to purchase the very pickup that started the minor furor, Greenfield notes that his 2014 is up for sale, although he admits he isn’t sure he should part with it. If you’d like to commission your own, both his Wells location and his other dealership, Spring Valley Chevrolet Buick, not far from Rochester, Minnesota, are both happy to take your order. We’ll have ours in Colt Seavers–spec brown and gold, thank you very much.
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