What is the difference between detailing and valeting?

The answer to this question is not quite as straightforward as you might think. They are basically the same, but there has been a divergence in recent years in regard to the UK.

If you had asked this question twenty years ago, the answer would have been quite straightforward. "Auto Detailing is the American name for it; Car Valeting is the British name for it." There is no difference. Car Valeting and Auto Detailing are essentially the same thing, and include the same skill set.

To a certain degree, this is still true. How they are marketed has changed over time. Let's dig deeper.

The American Car Wash

As long as people have had cars, there has been a need to wash them, and with the post-war boom in car sales, this became big business.

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To say this became a highly developed business is something of an understatement. Automated car washes sprung up across America, vying to get the into the sweet spot where the weather is not too hot and dry, and not too cold and wet, where cars get their dirtiest.

It, of course, became a real estate business much like fast food restaurants. They would buy prime land to sit on, with the business paying for its self and the tax and rates. However, there was real money to be made from the actual car wash too.

Car washes are far better now than they were back in the 1950s, but even today they don't do a perfect job, and can miss quite large areas, and will certainly miss small areas around wing mirrors, badges, etc. So after the car went through the automated car wash, it would be taken to one side to take care of the details.^[1]

Obviously, 'detailing' the car would become a business in its own right. America very much has a car culture, and having a nice car, in tip-top condition, is an integral part of the American dream^[2]. This meant there was demand for skilled detailers who could offer services such as polishing and even small repairs.

Ever entrepreneurial, our American cousins were able to add to their list of services, with things like carpet recolouring and air-conditioning servicing, as they had a good solid business to build on. The US industry has always been far better developed than anything in Europe, and the public perception of it regarding skill and value has been fairly good.

That is not to say that the US doesn't have Service Detailing and Express Detailing, which is exactly the same as lower end valeting or 'car washing' found in the UK and elsewhere.

The British Trade

Things developed somewhat differently in the UK. We do not have the same kind of car culture, and the business model for car washes wouldn't work in quite the same way over here.

However, we did have a culture of making high-quality prestige cars such as Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Daimler, Bentley and Rolls-Royce, which were favoured by the rich and famous. 

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While the origin of the word "valet"^[3], and how it relates to the car business, is lost to the mists of time (I have looked), it seems likely that it originated in the prestige car dealerships. It was likely meant to invoke thoughts of a Gentleman's valet^[4], or a more likely, a valet (another word for groom) found at a stable, taking care of the horses.

This is where I enter the scene because it is the job I did while still at school. Technically, I was a valet, with thirty or so cars to maintain at a dealership in Westcliff-on-sea. Thankfully, I wasn't forced to wear riding breeches or a bow tie, but I did have to wash and vac an awful lot of cars every weekend. There wasn't much more to it than that for me. I would have to hand polish and wax a few, I would black the tires, spray some silicone on the dashboard and apply an air fresher. And I expect it was the same for hundreds of other valets working in car dealerships up and down the country in the last century.

For anything more serious, such as machine polishing, a contract valeter would be called. These were guys who would mainly go from dealership to dealership doing the same job full time.

Although, with that said, a fair few of them, were seasonal, splitting winter and summer between car valeting and things like cleaning driveways and guttering. I do remember one guy did valeting during the winter, and was an ice cream man over the summer.

Others worked for large agencies which told them which dealership to go to and were run like most other cleaning companies. Most of the work was for the trade, who wanted it done cheap.

There are a couple of things that need to be explained. Car dealers have always had a terrible reputation in the UK^[5], and often it has been well deserved. For this reason, to prevent them fiddling their taxes, the tax man looks at what they bought a car for and what they sold it for, and taxes them on the difference. They cannot claim any deductions for mechanical repairs, bodyshop or valeting. It can be tough working for the dealerships, and they will never pay more than they absolutely need to.

Another thing that should be mentioned is that 'back in the day', if you wanted to pick up some retail trade, there were really only two options available to you. Word of mouth, and the Yellow Pages.

To be found in the Yellow Pages, you had to be in the right section. I cannot begin to tell you the fun and games we used to have with the Yellow Pages salesmen. For a long time, there wasn't really a suitable section, and for a while, there were several possible sections. But the bottom line is, they got to choose what we were called. And so eventually, we all came to be filed under, "Car Valeters".... or "Car Valet Services", or "Car Cleaning".

Most car valeters were mobile and working mostly for the trade. The skill set was largely the same as our American cousins, but the customer was different. Even the mindset of the retail customer was different, with the perception of car valeters not particularly valued or held in high regard.^[6]

There were, of course, exceptions. There were people who might do mainly retail work, be able to command decent money and provide a skilled, quality service. I would like to think our company fell into this category back in the last century, with us doing increasingly less trade work. However, exceptions don't count, public perception is what really counts.

Developing the industry

We won't claim we were alone, but in the early 2000s, we made a conscious decision to develop the industry and perhaps rebrand or reframe how we were perceived by the public. Believe it or not, we would like to make more money, it would make our wives happy.

Gary had been over to the US in the 1990s, and seen how the industry worked over there, and so it was a rather obvious step to rename what we were doing as "Car Detailing" in the hope that some of the panache and mystique rubbed off on us.

This made even more sense as American companies like Meguiar's were pushing to get into the UK market and were having some success with the enthusiast community. 

There has always been a thriving car club scene in the UK, but the internet meant you didn't have to attend a monthly meet-up, you could just go on a forum. Soon there were forums dedicated to just car care and car detailing, and a new sub-culture was born^[7][8]. As with any internet subculture, there was much drama, snobbery, elitism and one-upmanship and no discussion of this subject would be complete without mentioning it. The enthusiasts were definitely of the opinion that detailers are a superior animal to valeters.

And so some time in 2003-2004 we started to shy way from using "Car Valeting" and towards "Car Detailing", which we felt better reflected what we do. We weren't the only ones.

Although we would still advertise in the Yellow Pages back then, we were in no mood to fight with them over a new category, and Google was now a thing. Most of our work came from the internet, so like everyone else, we were playing the keyword game. This meant we could list our services and people would find us regardless or what they called it. If they typed in "polish out a scratch" we would appear in the results. As you can imagine, most still searched for "Car Valeters" which meant that ditching the name entirely meant you lost out on business.

The death of valeting

The real change came in 2004 with mass immigration from the EU. Because all you need is a bucket and sponge to start a business; hand car washes started cropping up by the side of the road all over the place.

They adopted the word "valeting" and would sell you a basic "Valet" for as little as £4. Although some of them did a good job and didn't scratch your car up with a broom, it certainly wasn't a valet or anything like it.

This devastated the industry. The perceived value of a valet became £5-£10. This was an impossible target to reach for a business which needs to pay rent, rates, insurance and pesky details like income tax^[9][10][11], while complying with all the regulations the EU were kind enough to impose on us. 

This chopped us off at the knees. You see, whether you are going to polish a car, apply a coating, or pretty much any skilled service you can charge reasonable money for, you still need to do that basic valet first, at bare minimum. It is essential it is done properly and it takes time. 

In fact, at that time, the customer was mostly likely approaching you for the valet, and anything else was likely to be an up-sell. You can see the problem, when you add up all your overheads and need to charge £110, and the fellas down the road are promising to do the same thing for £15 -- hard times.

All the "bread and butter" work that could keep a valeter ticking over, was gone. Even the dealerships stopped calling. This made it practically impossible to build a business from the bottom up.

Top-down approach

The answer is not to build specialist, skilled services on top of valeting as an up-sell, but to package up your specialist services and sell the result. The internet helped with this, as we could show customers the before and after of what we were capable of. Instagram and Facebook allowed us to show our work.

New Again was lucky in this respect because when the really tough times hit with the crash of 2008, we were already doing this. It was still tough, and the number of customers with expensive sports cars that they wanted us to detail went from a dozen a week to near zero.

There was a day shortly before the crash where we had six Porsches in the workshop at one time. After the crash, it was almost a year before we saw another Porsche.

There could be another crash on the way, and we hope the whole industry has developed in a way which makes it more recession proof.^[12]

We managed to survive largely because we had specialized, we were doing things like restoring cars which had been caught in floods. Environmental contamination, removing odour, we even did a crime scene or two and cleaned up police cars after 'incidents'. Where there's muck, there's brass. 

However, although we may strip out a car's interior and clean it in detail, or spend days cleaning splattered concrete from cars, it is not is what is typically thought of when we talk about "detailing".

We were an exception, but there were others. There were guys who specialized in high-end cars who would polish them to the nth degree over the course of several days for extremely wealthy clients.

At least that is the way it appeared. People in the industry talk to each other, so we know that despite the high price tag, they usually took so long they weren't making much money, and most of them would only get a job like this once every few weeks and the rest of the time they would be working as contract valeters.

I mention this, not to put them down, but to point out that it isn't a fantastic business model. There are only so many Lamborghini and Arab Princes to go around! To make a living from this kind of work, you need a larger customer base. 

With that said, they may have saved the industry and really should be commended. They opened the door, and shoved a foot in it, to the idea that you go to a "Detailer" to do something amazing with your car, and that detailers are skilled professionals who can provide a valuable service... and not just a cleaner.

You may have noticed I have mentioned very little about what a valeter or detailer does because there is very little to say.  As I already mentioned, Gary went out to America in the 1990s, and we had Americans visit us from California in the early 2000s, there was very little to learn about how to detail a car. If anything changed, it was the customer, and customer service.  Finding the customers or making our customers into the right kind of customer, informing them of what we could do. An important part of which is marketing through education, something I like to think I have helped play a part in over the last 20 years. 

Ceramic Coatings come to the rescue!

I really cannot conclude this article without mentioning ceramic coatings. They have had a major effect on the industry. You may be able to set up a 'car wash' business with just a bucket and sponge, but you can't do ceramic coatings unless you become accredited and for that, you need to prove you have sufficient skills.

This, as they say, sorts the men from the boys, and keeps out the riff-raff.

I am not suggesting that if you are a mobile guy who isn't accredited with a ceramic coating supplier, that you aren't a real car detailer. Not at all! They, too, have been able to raise their game to the kinds of levels we all want, so we are no longer viewed as just cleaners.

Customer Service

When you charge a higher price, the customer expects professionalism and service. Over the years, I have had customers tell me that as we are car guys, they expect us to look like a garage workshop. But the move is away from that, to studios and showrooms, with clean walls and floors, and even leather arm chairs in a reception room and courtesy cars ready to go in the car park.

Customers expect you to be professional on the phone, and spell things correctly on forms. And while wearing an ironed shirt and being able to spell "Peugeot" correctly doesn't make you an elite detailer, it all helps.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the story of how Car Valeters became Car Detailers in the UK.

Essentially, it's the same thing, it isn't really the skills of the technicians who have changed, it is a pivot away from what we were doing, to a more American style of service. A rebranding to differentiate ourselves from those guys aside the road who wash cars and the agency workers who show up at dealerships in vans they don't own.

However, just because somebody calls themselves a valeter, doesn't mean they aren't as skilled as somebody who calls themselves a detailer. Because there are many who are putting effort into this rebranding, there is an attempt to draw hard distinctions. But frankly, the distinctions are artificial.

For us here at New Again, we are often asked, "Can you valet my car?" or even, "Can you detail my car?", and upon questioning the customer, we say, for what they want to do, they might want to go to the other company in town. Because they just want a clean, maybe have the seats shampooed, and they want it done today. However, if you want the car polished, coated, some paintwork correction, maybe even some bodywork repairs because you want the car to look like new, then we are the company for you. We will detail it! We'll make it like new again.

We are redefining the words for what suits us, but what suits us, might not suit everyone else. I am sure there will be people who will disagree with my assessment. But this has been my perspective as somebody who's been in it for decades.