Ely’s Tires

In November 2011 a client of mine mentioned me to the owner of a family tire shop. I had not asked him to. The owner wrote to me the next day.

He wanted a new website. What I quoted was the site redesign, a logo refresh, and an online store that could take payments. The contract came back countersigned on November 23. I sent the first round of logo concepts three days later.

He did not like any of them, and he said so, with sixteen written comments about what was wrong. I worked through the list and he approved a direction three days later.

Twenty-eight concepts, and Illustrator’s own save stamps sort them into three sittings. One on November 22, the day before the contract came back countersigned. Seventeen from 1:11pm on the 25th through 12:17am on the 26th. Then ten on the evening of the 26th, 8:02pm to 10:29pm, and those are not more of the same mark: a redrawn wordmark, a tire set beside it, and a run at color. The sixteen written comments sit in that gap, which is what makes the last group read as an answer rather than a round.

The tagline was mine: “a reputation you can ride on.” It went out in that first round and it is not the one that lasted. The owner wrote his own line: “Fast service, and a great price!” I set it with an ellipsis, which is how I punctuate, so the mark reads “Fast service… and a great price!” That is the one that lasted.

Ely’s Tires Online

I named the shop’s online arm Ely’s Tires Online in ad copy I wrote in June 2012, five weeks before I moved to Florida to run it. I went in house that July. Between then and 2018 I moved that store across five e-commerce platforms and kept rebuilding the identity as it went: the mark with and without the slogan, magnetic sign variants, a standalone “e”, and an “an Ely’s Tires company” lockup for the sister brands.

Two later Ely’s Tires lockups side by side: the standalone e mark, and the an Ely’s Tires company endorsement line, each with its file save stamp — Neither of these is a logo refresh. They are the two jobs an identity gets handed once a business grows past one shop: shrink to a single letter and still be recognized, and sit under somebody else’s name without taking it over. Two files, seventeen months apart, which is what “kept rebuilding the identity as it went” looks like once you read the stamps.

In 2019 the wheel side of the business took a new name. Ely’s Tires Online became AllOEMRims.com between April and September. StockRim.com and OEM Wheels & more were the other two candidates. Same owner, same shop, same software underneath. AllOEMRims is the one I have been designing ever since.

2026 Refresh

In 2026 I rebuilt the tire shop’s own site from top to bottom. New service pages for alignments, brakes, oil changes, and tire installation. Local-search schema markup, the structured data that tells Google what a business is and where it sits, so the shop turns up for the searches that are actually about it. Same brand, modern foundation.

Fifteen years on, I am still drawing the same mark. It is on the awning and the building signs I set in 2019, and it is what the 2026 site is built around.