FROM TODD, THE FOUNDER
So… who built
this thing?
As a kid, I spent my summers mowing lawns and working in our family's orchard. When I was 13, I saved enough money to buy a 1966 Ford Mustang. It wasn't perfect, but I didn't care. I spent a lot of hours working on it, customizing it, making it a little cooler, and figuring out different things I could do to it.
Looking back, I don't think I was just customizing a car to make it cooler. I was probably figuring out what I'd spend most of my working life doing.
I've always liked looking at something and thinking:
"How could I make this more awesome?"
That eventually led me into the car business. I spent about ten years selling cars and ended up owning an independent dealership that was eventually bought by Toyota. After that, I got into the car wash business and have owned and operated several car washes in Oregon. Over the years, well over a million vehicles have gone through our washes.
But cars and car washes are really only part of the story.
A few years ago, I had this idea to build a dinosaur-themed vacation rental called Jurassic Retreat.
And we didn't just put some dinosaur stuff on the walls and call it a dinosaur house.
We went pretty big with it.
We had a 40-foot-long, 20-foot-tall animatronic T-Rex, raptors, a Triceratops, huge gates out front, and rooms and different parts of the property themed around characters and ideas from the movies.
Did a vacation rental need a giant T-Rex?
Probably not.
But it was a heck of a lot cooler with one.
And I think that's probably a pretty good example of how my brain works.
I've never been that interested in just doing something the same way everyone else does it. I like figuring out that extra thing that makes someone stop and look at it, smile, take a picture, show their friends, or just say, "That's pretty cool."
That's also how I ended up inventing different products for the car wash industry. Most of them started with me using something at one of my washes and thinking there had to be a better way to do it.
And eventually, that same thinking led to the Lightspeed Blaster.
After being around car washes for so many years, one thing I've always loved about tunnel washes is the experience.
You've got the colored soap, the lights, the water and everything going on around the car. Kids love it. And honestly, adults think it's pretty cool too.
Then you go home, pull out your pressure washer to wash your car, driveway, or whatever else needs cleaning, and you've basically just got water coming out of the same boring old pressure washer gun.
It works.
It's just not very exciting.
So I started thinking:
Why couldn't pressure washing at home have some of that same experience?
That's really where Lightspeed Blaster came from.
I didn't want to make just another pressure washer gun. I wanted something that was fun to use. Something you'd want to pull out in the evening when the lights really show up. Something your kids would come outside to watch. Something your neighbor might walk over and ask you about.
Basically, I wanted to take something pretty ordinary and make it a lot more awesome.
But I also didn't want to build a toy.
If I'm going to hook something up to a pressure washer, it needs to work. That's why we put so much effort into what's underneath all the lights and sound - premium materials, thoughtful design, and the kind of quality I'd expect to use at my own car washes.
I've always been inspired by movies and TV shows like Knight Rider, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and Guardians of the Galaxy. I'm a nerd like that. I love the lights, sounds, technology, cars, dinosaurs - all the things that can make you feel like a kid again for a minute.
I think some of that has probably worked its way into a lot of the things I've built without me even realizing it.
Whether it was customizing my Mustang when I was 13, building Jurassic Retreat, coming up with products for my car washes, or now building Lightspeed Blaster, there really has been a pretty similar idea behind all of it:
Take something ordinary and figure out how to make it an extraordinary experience.
Or maybe even simpler than that:
Make ordinary things more awesome.
— Todd Perkins
Founder, Lightspeed Blaster
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Designed in the USA. Manufactured in China.