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Detailing Products You DON'T Need (And What Actually Matters)

The Auto Detailing Podcast Sep 10, 2025 15 min

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About this episode

The detailing industry often promotes an overwhelming array of products, leading enthusiasts to believe they need countless bottles to achieve great results. Joe shares insights from his extensive experience in the detailing world, advocating for a simplified approach with just a few essential products. He discusses the redundancy in product offerings and emphasizes that quality over quantity can yield excellent results. Listeners will learn which products are truly necessary and how to avoid falling for marketing hype that complicates the detailing process.

Topics: product redundancy essential detailing products simplified detailing overhyped products effective cleaning solutions dilution ratios interior cleaning ceramic sprays versatile polishes cost-effective detailing

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The detailing industry and other brands want you to think and want you to believe that you

need 50 to 100 different bottles on your shelf.

And if you don't have a master collection of products, then you are just clearly not

a master detailer, and that's just how it is.

Now, there's a side angle of this of, for some reason, those of us who enjoy washing

our cars, we like to have a lot of products, but the product brands of the industry

are not helping us because they tell us that we need so many more products than we actually

have.

And today, I'm going to tell you which products you can skip and why that actually matters

for keeping your car clean and protected.

And I come at this from a standpoint of testing everything under the sun.

I literally, my YouTube channel, you can go back and see that I've tested hundreds

and hundreds and hundreds of products.

I've worked with global brands.

I've talked about that.

I have my own brand, my own product brand, and so I see and have seen pretty much every

angle of the detailing industry, not to kind of, you know, beat a dead horse here, but

been detailing since, you know, 2008 as my own business.

I did a lot.

I worked at a blender.

I worked for Turtle Wax for five years, worked on their global development team,

worked directly with blenders before I worked with Turtle Wax, continued to work with

blenders and have my own brand.

So I've seen through the hype.

I've seen products literally be developed, hyped up in, you know, meetings

and boardrooms and sold to other brands and those brands have run with it.

I've, you know, private labeled for Amazon brands and Facebook only

brands and Facebook heavy brands and I've seen all of it.

And so a lot of that I was frustrated through.

And that's why I started doing a torture test on my YouTube channel

and I've tested a zillion things.

So, you know, the first thing that I thought about and the first questions

that I started to bring out is like, why does the industry over complicate these

things? And what I realized is that brands make more money by creating

either new categories of products or by over complicating things like that.

There is so much redundancy in the industry with products because by

over complicating it, they make more money.

Brands make more money.

And this is so, this is what, this is the game plan for every single brand.

Let's just over complicate it to the integrity so that it's so complicated

that people are afraid to do anything, but stick within our system.

Saw someone the other day talking about how, you know,

their machine throw is perfect because they've tried, you know,

everything else and they found that that size machine throw is perfect.

But it's only perfect when you use their pad and their liquid.

And I just thought to myself, like, why are we lying?

Like, that's not true.

That's in no, nowhere in the history of the detailing industry

is that true other than they found a way to get a subpar product to work.

And if you use that subpar product in any other environment, it won't work.

So they have to over complicate it.

And that is the thing I've seen from working with blenders,

working with big brands and everything in between is that

when you can't get to somewhere with a product, you over complicate it.

OK, and you make it work in a very rigid box, our pad, our liquid,

whatever, our machine, whatever, OK, and it can only work in that system.

And if you use it outside the system,

well, that's why you're not getting the results that we say you are.

But the truth is and the real truth is that if you actually had a quality

product, it would work in a multitude of environments.

And so that's one thing I realized working with Tom on developing

the picture perfect polish is that a good polish will work

on a multitude of pads in a multitude of different situations.

However, because brands have over complicated everything to the degree,

now people do look for systems.

And so, though, for example, just to use my own product,

the picture perfect polish will work with pretty much any pad in any situation

and get the desired result that you're looking for.

People were asking for a system, so I did develop a system around that.

Right. But, you know, this idea beyond polishes, but like soaps like

a high pH, low pH, pH neutral, which really my personal opinion is

we probably shouldn't even have pH neutral soaps.

You should have an adjustable pH soap that you can make pH neutral.

But you can also make higher pH.

That would be, you know, that makes a lot of sense to me.

But, you know, having six different soaps

that basically all do the same thing, except this one's mega foam.

This one's super mega foam.

This one's runny.

This one's thick.

This one has new surfactants, but we can't tell you what surfactants it is.

This one's upgraded, but we can't tell you why it's upgraded.

It's just like, what are we doing, right?

And the truth of all of this is that most people can get 90 percent,

99 percent of the results that they want with a small core kit.

And let me take a little tangent real quick just to weave this in of like,

I never really wanted to have my own product brand.

And I know I've talked about this before, but that is my core truth

is I never wanted to have my own product brand.

I actually prefer the private label side of things.

I love private labeling.

I love strategy with brands.

I love talking about them to behind the scenes.

I love the behind the scenes of work.

That is my favorite part.

However, I got so frustrated a brand's doing this that that was why I started

my own brand to show publicly that you could do it differently, that you didn't

have to have six different soaps.

You didn't have to follow the path that every other brand does because just

like with detailing businesses, everyone just looks at what other people are

doing and they just do that.

That's why there's so many brands right now.

That's a version two, version six, version four, version blah, blah, blah,

blah upgraded knew this, knew that.

And it's like, I just don't understand that either.

But it people do it.

Brands do it because that's what every brand does and that's what they're

watching. So instead of here's like some examples of what I found.

I already talked about the soap, right?

When I was looking at, you know, developing a soap for me personally,

I thought, what could, how could you make a soap different?

Of course, having a pH neutral soap is the most basic product on the

face of the earth.

Making it runny or thick is not a big issue at all.

It's like that is not a technology claim to make it runny or thick.

And so when I developed the soap, the Super Soap, I thought of the premise

of like, I like to wash my car.

A lot of people like to wash their car.

That's great.

But what happens every time you wash your car?

You run the chance of scratching it.

So why don't we make a soap that actually cleans the car instead of

just lubricates the surface, right?

And then, of course, things like making it foam.

And then I made mine runnier because I like a runny soap, right?

And so I figured if I could do all those things, that would be a really

quality soap. And that's what I did.

You know why?

Because making your soap thick or thin is not a technology play.

That is so simple.

You actually soap when you're blending it is thin and you add

thickeners into it.

OK, so if you just add less thickeners, you will have less thick soap.

That is not technology play, right?

But me personally, the Super Soap I developed it on YouTube is just a soap

that I really like and it cleans incredibly well because that's what I wanted

in a soap and it is pH neutral when it's hitting the surface of the car.

And it is higher pH in the bottle because if you add more soap,

you can get higher pH, which is going to help you clean the car even better.

Same when it comes to interiors, like there's separate interior cleaners

for every surface where you got a leather cleaner, you got an interior

detailer, you got a plastic and vinyl cleaner.

And I thought, what if we just created one safe balance cleaner?

That's where the complete cabinet cleaner came from, right?

It works everywhere, it works on everything.

In fact, Jessica Tran with JT Mobile Detailer Studio 94.

She's on TikTok and Instagram and stuff.

She's local to me and just came by and picked up a couple of gallons of the

complete Gabon cleaner because she's like, when I look at the dilution ratios,

when I purchase it in the gallon and then I look at how effective it is.

Everything from a disaster detail that she worked on to maintenance these

details, she's like, I never really feel the need to go above four to one.

And she's like, and at four to one,

this is like the most economical cleaner ever.

By the way, also smells great, right?

And she goes, I've had multiple compliments.

She's using it in her at her detail shop,

but she's like, I've had multiple compliments of customers saying that they

love the smell. And I'm like, you know what?

Truth be told, some people use it as an air freshener in their car.

But again, we don't need to have five different products for the inside of

the car. Why don't we just make one really good one?

It's also pH neutral, right?

I think we're over this one for the most part, but like expensive waxes.

That's just so dumb.

Waxes a little bit outdated.

There's, you know, some toughest shells, so much easier to apply, so much quicker,

so much longer lasting and gives you that just wax look.

And we finally got over the hump of like ceramic sprays that smell bad.

Yeah, tire shine is another one where it's like high shine, low shine,

medium shine, matte shine.

Who's buying a matte tire shine?

Like, who's doing that?

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Instead of just instead of buying a matte tire shine,

wouldn't you want a tire shine that you could just dilute down and then you

could use everywhere like your fenders, your engine.

And if you want that matte look on your tires, you could either just dilute

it down further or you can wipe it off a little bit, right?

So that's what I have in a water based

dressing like all dressed up. It's all you need.

So one product highly dilutable, just like most of my products highly dilutable.

And if you want matte finish, you could have it.

Me, myself, I like shiny tires, so I use it almost straight sometimes.

And I like it that way, right?

But again, one product will do multiple things.

And the picture perfect polish, I got already talked about it,

is the same thing.

It's a versatile one step polish.

And in fact, I had an email go out yesterday.

So if you're not on my email list, you could sign up for that.

And I shared a YouTube video from someone who in Florida was doing a black

hammered truck, completely hammered and with one product, one pad.

I mean, this truck literally, if you email me,

if you send me an email, I will send you a link to the YouTube video or

actually, you know, I'll just put it in the description below.

This truck was hammered and one pad,

few passes, one machine, one liquid.

I'm telling you, ninety nine point nine percent perfect.

It looked like this truck out repainted.

It was amazing, one polish, one product, one liquid.

We don't need a million different products.

We don't need a million different detail sprays.

We don't need glass cleaners.

We don't need so many different products that are often just diluted

down in your basically buying water.

You want a really good glass cleaner?

Try diluted or not diluted try.

Actually, you can diluted tough shell works really good.

But try distilled water or deionized water and a clean Costco microfiber towel.

That is the best glass cleaner there possibly is.

So I think instead of having a million different products,

what actually matters is having soaps that are safe and effective, have to be

effective, right, a protection product, ceramic spray.

I think tough shell is the best ceramic spray on the market.

You could apply to your whole card and literally two minutes.

I think you need a solid interior cleaner,

a polish that can cut and finish.

I think you need quality microfiber towels and really that's it.

Like five or six core products and you can nail it.

Jessica, when she was over, she brought up a good idea of like a wheel

entire cleaner. I probably add that to the list.

A water spot remover wheel cleaner,

which I already have in Pure Magic Cleaner,

but really you just need five or six core products.

And why simplify?

Because it saves you money, first of all,

saves you space, second of all, and saves you time.

You don't have to overthink it, especially if you're trying to teach

a team or you have a detail shop.

You don't want to have to overthink it, right?

And that's also why one thing that I never understood with other

product brands, because it's one of the most confusing things of every

product brand, why do they not have a standardized dilution ratio

for every one of their products?

And that is something that I do with all my products.

They all contain because I make them to spec.

First of all, but they all contain a very specific

and it's the same across the board dilution ratios, usually one to one,

four to one, ten to one, and beyond that, you're on your own, right?

But all my products in the gallon format can be diluted by the same exact

dilution ratios because we're in the detailing industry.

We should actually pay attention to details like this.

So having fewer products saves you time, saves you space, saves all that,

gives you a better result, and it makes you more consistent.

Instead of switching products constantly,

it makes you way more consistent.

It's easier for beginners, even pros and weekend warriors.

The more I detailed and the

the more years that went by in my detailing business, I shrink down how many

products I brought with me and I try to get down to as few products as possible

because it's just more efficient.

It's just more efficient.

So don't bind to the hype.

You don't need one hundred and fifty thousand products.

You just need the right products, right?

So comment below what products you think are overhyped or the ones that you

can't live without.

Let me know if there are some specialty

products that you just can't live without.

I'd love to hear where I'm wrong and where I may be right.

Of course, I will have all the jimbos detailing products linked below.

Also on Amazon as well for convenience, really.

And so if you're an Amazon shopper, I have just about all my products up on

Amazon, a link to my Amazon store and my Shopify or my store directly.

But yeah, those are the products that I think you need.

And the detailing products that you definitely don't need.

So hope you guys enjoyed that one.

I will also encourage you to check out that YouTube video.

Hopefully the guy's OK with me sharing that.

It's a phenomenal video and I was actually blown away at the result that he was

able to achieve. So I will make sure to put that in the description as well.

So with that, I hope you guys enjoyed that.

We'll catch you on the next one.

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