Author: Jonathan Upton

Categories
Retirement

Retirement Update #1

The Acton Swap Meet has come and gone, and Liquidation Blowout #1 of original pairs is complete. Stay tuned for Liquidation Blowout #2 later this year.

Ironically, business has been booming for 2024 in comparison to our sales over the past ten years. It seems that people have received the message that we’re closing down next year, and they’re eager to scoop a robustly-restored set of plates with our guarantee of YOM eligibility. Now is the time to act, before your year sells out for good. Even though business is temporarily booming, this is only a flash in the pan. Jon is tired of restoring plates and he wants to be done.

As predicted, we are becoming low in stock for certain years. Once we’ve sold out of a particular year where there are no further YOM-guaranteed items coming down the pipe, we will be labeling all plates of that year as “permanently sold out” in our stock lineup. As of now, that means the following years are sold out and not expected to return: 1919, 1920, 1922, 1923, 1928, and 1955. We are low (one last pair remaining) on several other years. We have reduced prices on several YOM years. Check our stock!

Categories
Retirement

We’re retiring!

All good things must come to an end. And that includes Ontplates.com as a functioning small business. But we’re not shutting our doors imminently, and we’re certainly not going to leave our loyal customers out in the cold.

Ontplates.com is a sole proprietorship, which means everything is the responsibility of one person in his spare time. As life happens, things change. Spare time isn’t as easy to find. New interests unfold. Families have new commitments. For a variety of reasons—some personal and some economical—Ontplates.com will ramp down in 2024, and will cease business operations in mid-2025.

Product Availability

To prepare for this change, we will focus our restoration and sale operations on works-in-progress. We hope to have no stalled items in our work queue by December 2024. Usually, when we shut down for the winter (because of no heat in the home garage), everything is paused: We have plates that have been blasted and are waiting for body repair. We have repaired plates that are waiting for primer. We have primed plates waiting for top coats. And we have top-coated plates waiting for number detailing. Our goal for December 2024 is to have no remaining restoration work. This means that restored plates of certain years will eventually go out of stock, not to return.

Timeline for Closure

We will continue until December 31, 2024, to sell pairs of plates that are guaranteed for Year of Manufacture registration. After that date, guaranteed sales will cease. Ontplates.com will continue to exist as a business until June 30, 2025. This is for two reasons:

  1. To be available for customer support during their 6-month guarantee period, and;
  2. To liquidate our remaining stock on an unguaranteed, as-is basis.

After June 30, 2025, our guarantee obligations will have been fulfilled, and we can discontinue business operations without compromising the previous guarantees that we have made.

The Future

The business itself is not for sale. The Ontplates.com brand will not be sold, and will continue to be used for hobby promotion purposes after formal closure of the business, which won’t happen until the end of June 2025. This is good news, because it means that you’ll still be able to find Jon and pick his brain if you have questions about what you can and cannot do with Ontario’s YOM program.

Ontplates.com has built a well-earned reputation of being an honest, straight-shooting business that refuses to apply pressure to make a sale. There is an element of trust that clients must forge with us, as with any small online business. Some clients ask to contact us by phone to make sure that we’re legit before making a purchase. We’ve been around for 20 years, and as of this moment, we’ve sold 1719 registrable sets of plates (only 9 customers have ever had to take us up on our guarantee). We eschew the notion of “here today, gone tomorrow.” We will not simply vanish into the night without warning. If we have to wrap up, we’re going to do right by our customers… as we always have.

Updated Terms and Conditions

We have updated our Terms and Conditions page to outline exactly when we will stop offering guaranteed plates for sale, and how we will honour existing guarantees during our end-business liquidation.

Categories
News

Celebrating 20 Years

2023 marks the 20th year that Jon Upton has been selling Year of Manufacture licence plates in Ontario. Jon is the proprietor behind this business: He paints the plates, designs the web site, answers the mail, buys the supplies, and does the accounting. Occasionally, he writes articles about himself in the third-person.

The first pair of Ontario plates that Jon sold specifically for Year of Manufacture registration was a mint pair of 1969 plates, back on September 3, 2003. Back then, no one knew about the YOM program, so business was very slow. Jon sold YOM pairs from his long-standing hobby website, The Back Bumper. There were no online pictures at first—just a list of plate years and numbers. As business picked up, Jon added images to the website, and made additions to the YOM stock more frequently.

Eventually, competitors surfaced, and it made sense for Jon to give his YOM sales a brand of its own. “OntarioPlates” wasn’t available as a web domain, and it was too long of a name. So Jon chose the domain “Ontplates,” registered his business under the name Ontplates.com, and weirdly started referring to himself as “we,” so he could say things like “We at Ontplates.com believe in client satisfaction.” Jon—the guy typing these words—takes a lot of care to project professionalism through this small business.

Jon set out to design a memorable logo for Ontplates.com. He didn’t want to hire an art company; doing so would cost as much as a year’s business revenue. He went without a logo for a few months (above) while creating and rejecting a few self-made drafts (below):

Eventually, he settled on a blue rectangle. It made sense, since Ontplates.com would sell many blue rectangles over the years. Jon learned how to use WordPress, built a unified website, and unveiled the new brand in late 2013.

Operating costs have ballooned over the past couple of years, but Ontplates.com is still chugging along at its ideal pace. As businesses go, we’re really the smallest of the small. Jon is our only employee; he’s a CEO who also has to sweep the floor. He paints in the summer when the shop is warm enough, and he stops in the winter when it’s too cold. There’s no doubt that our seasonal nature puts the brakes on the volume of business we can conduct. But if we were any more busy, we’d have to hire more employees!

Here’s to twenty years of proud service to classic car owners of Ontario!