Hello everyone! This is Mina, the blog manager of “Welcome Home, PORSCHE.” Since May, we’ve been running an interview series called “Porsche Supporters File,” featuring the people who quietly support Porsche. For the third installment, I spoke with Koichi Nakagawa, president of Nakabayashi Kogyo Co., Ltd., a long-established manufacturer of automotive body covers based in Tondabayashi City, Osaka Prefecture.

Chapter 1. Nakabayashi Kogyo and Automotive Body Covers

1-1: About Nakabayashi Kogyo

What kind of company is Nakabayashi Kogyo?

We are a manufacturer specializing in sewing automotive covers. Even for the same car model, the shape varies slightly depending on the grade, specifications, and year, so we measure patterns for each type and sew each cover by hand. Currently, we hold about 3,000 pattern templates for both domestic and foreign cars.

Orders for domestic and foreign car covers are roughly split 50/50, but the most common are Nissan GT-R models, which make up about 25% of our total orders. Meanwhile, Porsche orders account for about 5%. Interestingly, many orders come from owners of older models like the 930 and 964 rather than current models.
This year marks our 47th year in business, and thanks to our customers, we now receive orders from all over Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

A simple question: Mr. Nakagawa, why is the company called Nakabayashi Kogyo when your name is Nakagawa?

That’s a question I get often (laughs). Actually, my father, Nakagawa, co-founded the company with a partner named Hayashi. The company name “Nakabayashi” comes from combining “Naka” from Nakagawa and “Hayashi” from his partner’s name.

My father originally worked in a sewing processing company, but about 50 years ago, when automotive covers first appeared on the market, he had a strong feeling that “cars would continue to sell rapidly, so automotive covers would surely become popular too.” Leveraging the sewing know-how and skills he had developed, he started the company specializing in automotive body covers.

Were car body covers unheard of 50 years ago?

Yes, that’s right. Before then, the idea of putting a cover on a car didn’t really exist. However, Japan has a long-standing culture of wrapping precious items with furoshiki cloth, so the concept of a cover “wrapping your beloved car” was probably easy to accept.

For example, cases and accessories for smartphones have countless varieties in Japan, making it the most developed market in the world, and that too is a legacy of the furoshiki culture.
On the other hand, overseas, the idea of covering cars is not common, and it’s usual to just leave cars outside even if they get dirty or scratched.

1-2: Why Make Custom-Made Covers?

Did you originally make custom-made automotive covers?

No, when we started, we made universal body covers. That’s because about 50 years ago, most cars on the market had boxy designs, and sizes and shapes were almost the same regardless of manufacturer. However, from about 20 to 30 years ago, more uniquely designed cars appeared, shapes diversified, and universal covers no longer fit well.

About seven years ago, when I became president, we made a major shift to become a fully custom-made automotive body cover manufacturer, believing that “to satisfy customers, we must create covers from dedicated patterns tailored to each individual car.”

Some manufacturers still make universal designs, but to differentiate ourselves and provide real value to customers, we believe it’s necessary to painstakingly produce covers one by one, even if it takes more effort.

So you started measuring each car individually about seven years ago?

Yes. At first, domestic dealers would come to buy covers, so we visited them to measure cars and brought samples back and forth, making covers one at a time.

However, due to their customer service schedules, it was often hard to coordinate measuring and production. We thought about how to make measuring and sample creation smoother, and eventually arrived at the current method of having customers bring their cars to us. Gradually, more and more cars were brought in, and now we hold about 3,000 pattern templates.