Meet New Brunswick’s Off-Road Queen
Growing up in Sussex, Dana Douthwright’s passion for the off-road lifestyle started at a young age. But it wasn’t until 2009 when she and her husband Brad started Ultimate Offroad, a shop specializing in servicing off-road vehicles, that it became her career.
The business got its start when Brad wanted to purchase wheels to lift the family’s new truck. In order to get the tires he wanted from a company that only sold to businesses, he needed a business number, so they got one. After they realized their passion for working on off-road vehicles, they decided to take things the rest of the way and opened their own shop out of their home garage.
“We’re not business people. I did take it in school and Brad took it as well, but we were working. We had fantastic jobs that paid more than this did, but it was just a passion that we had and did in our spare time,” Douthwright says.
“We had the garage and then it literally just snowballed so fast. By the time I finally gave up my job at Xerox, I was doing more ordering and working on that than I was doing my actual job.”
There were some huge learning curves. First, they had to learn the ins-and-outs of the automotive industry. Douthwright was mostly self-taught. She learned the different components of suspension systems, specs for tires and wheels, even down to the lingo. At the same time, she was taking care of two small children. Working and living at home was trying at times, but she knew they were on to something.
“We put ourselves so far in debt with advertising, the equipment, the products that we had to do something or we would have lost our shirt,” Douthwright says. “It just kept going and going. I enjoyed it. I liked it. It was something I never thought I’d do, but I enjoy it.”
Since then, Ultimate Offroad has turned to Eastern Offroad. They moved from their home garage to a four bay shop on Millennium Drive, Quispamsis. They also opened an OK Tire alongside the shop, which won OK Tire’s Store of the Year award when it opened 2013.
OK Tire also took notice of Douthwright’s crazy journey and appointed her as their female ambassador. The automotive world is still dominated by men, but Douthwright says she wants to make the automotive community more inclusive for both the women working in it and the women being served.
“In this business, a lot of our customers are women. They make a lot of the buying decisions and the day-to-day functionality of the home,” says Douthwright. “So I want to be at work every day and be that person to be able to say ‘you’re safe here. You don’t have ‘sucker’ written across your forehead.'”
Douthwright says the stereotype of the clueless woman at the mechanic shop is still around and she wants to work towards changing that by being upfront and honest with her female customers.
“When you walk through that door, that’s the stereotype that comes with a female walking into the automotive world. I want to change that. I want to educate people,” she says.
“You get in your car and you drive it, but every dollar you spend in preventative maintenance could save you up to eight dollars in repair. Those are statistics we get from the industry, but no one really thinks about that. So that’s my job to educate and be upfront and realistic.”
It’s not just female customers who experience sexism and stereotyping in the industry, it’s something Douthwright herself faces every day.
“Just last week a gentleman came in and he had an F-150 and he wanted to put a slightly larger tire on it. My front counter staff is fantastic, but lift kits and tires, that’s my gig. So they come to me for a lot of these questions,” she says. “So I start talking and I’m trying to help him. I’m asking the right questions to get the information I need to make a recommendation, and he kept talking to [the male staff member] beside me as if I had no place being there.”
“Every day we run into that and it’s not their fault, it’s just the way it has always been. We’re still looked down on. So trying change that is hard to overcome too.”
Though these situations are aggravating, Douthwright chooses to put her energy back into her business. She says Eastern Offroad has some big long-terms plans which include creating its own line of products made specifically for the Canadian offroader using Bullet Liner (of which Eastern Offroad is a Canadian distributor) as custom coating. Douthwright would also like to see Eastern Offroad expand, first in its Quispamsis location, and then to other stores across Canada.
“We also want to branch out and have multiple stores across Canada because a lot of our customers are out west and a lot of those people out west are from the East Coast,” she says. “So when they’re buying something from us, they’re supporting their local economy. So this whole ‘East Coast lifestyle’ thing is a culture that is us. That’s what we do.”
“If we’re able to have our own brand and are able to have other stores, I think we can to a lot disruption in the Canadian economy, especially being a female [representative] in it.”
Like most New Brunswickers, Douthwirght is all too aware of the reputation the province often has on the national stage. She wants her businesses to be a part of changing that.
“Where we live is ‘No Funswick.’ Why is it like that? Because of the economy. Because of a long-standing stereotype that we’re backwards … and that’s a part of what I want to change too,” she says.
“We are entrepreneurial people. We are smart. We have good ideas. We’re good business people, so come here. Put your faith in us. Invest in us so we can compete with these huge companies in the States that probably started as something similar. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. We just happened to start out of our house. We have big hopes and big dreams and we just have to help them come true with the help from everybody.”