It was a sleek, aerodynamic piece of industrial art. A Philco or Frigidaire looked like it had been designed with the same artistic flair as a ´57 Chevy.

Maybe we even remember the old GE generator top fridge at grandma´s house. Those were the days!

In Clayton, Georgia, a town in the Appalachian foothills an hour and a half outside of Atlanta, John Jowers is doing a brisk business keeping a piece of Americana alive.

John and his team at Antique Appliances (www.antiqueappliances.com) have expanded his father´s appliance business to include the full restoration of vintage refrigerators and stoves for a growing number of customers who crave the style and nostalgia of a bygone era.

Marvin Jowers, John´s father, opened his business after World War II.

It began as a radio repair shop, since large appliances hadn´t yet gained the popularity they would in just a few short years. In 1952, Marvin bought a GE appliance franchise and began to sell and service both GE appliances and radios.

In 1958, he moved into the business to its current location, and it continues to operate as Jowers TV & Appliance. John grew up helping his father, and made the family business a full-time career in 1980.

Although the appliance business was successful, Clayton is a resort area, and the population base shifts drastically from winter to summer. And while he had never given any thought to restoring vintage appliances, John knew that he had to find a way to build his sales and keep his team occupied during the off-season.

"We put it in our front window as part of a Christmas display, and suddenly someone wanted to buy it!

Once it was gone, the phone began to ring off the hook—everyone wanted to know where the little red refrigerator had gone! So, we began doing one-off pieces for people locally. We dabbled in it for a couple of years, and someone convinced me that there really was a market for what we were doing, so I decided to build a web site."

John enlisted Gina Drew, a web designer known locally as "The Computer Lady" (http://www.the-computer-lady.com/) to design, build, and manage www.antiqueappliances.com.

Once the initial site was launched, John says they began to immediately get responses. Most importantly, they got valuable feedback from their customers telling them what they liked and didn´t like about the site.

"Collectively, we worked together to expand the site from the original 6 pages to what is now about 170 pages, and we´ve torn it up and redesigned it 3 times over the last 4 years. We average about 550,000 hits per month."

But John´s foray into cyberspace did not come without reservations.

"At first, I was negative about it. I thought I was just throwing the money away. The response has blown us all out of the water. After September 11th, I was prepared for business to go down the tubes. I told the guys that what we were doing was a luxury, not a necessity, and that if the economy grinds to a halt, no one´s going to buy this stuff."

Despite September´s tragedies and a recessed economy, John´s restoration business has continued to blossom, and his web traffic shows this trend is not a fluke. From December to January, for example, his site traffic increased 47%.

The numbers held steady in February, but March has shown still more growth. If anything, he says, it´s the sales of new appliances that have been sluggish.

There has certainly been an element of serendipity to John´s success. A visit to the site´s online showroom shows a variety of brightly painted refrigerators in red, yellow, and blue—not traditional colors for large appliances.

John admits that the reason for choosing these bold colors was not based on period style or artistic whimsy. They had been created as pieces for the online showroom simply because plain white refrigerators didn´t show up very well on the web site! Meanwhile, these colorful pieces have become hot items.

Although John was skittish about his initial investment of a few hundred dollars to create his first site, he now feels that it is undoubtedly responsible for the success of his restoration business:

"I depend on the Internet. Without the Internet, I wouldn´t have the antique business."

"If I were trying to market these items in a 100-mile radius, there simply aren´t enough potential clients that want these products or have the money to spend to make it a viable business. 98% of the business I do with the vintage appliances comes from the Internet."

John has certainly extended the reach of his business via the Internet beyond a 100-mile radius. His refurnished stoves and refrigerators have found homes all across the country and beyond.

"Very few of our clients are in our general area. We keep a map up in the office and we peg every city that we go to or ship to, and when you look at the map, the bulk of the clients have been in the New England states. Although we´ve shipped something to almost every state in the Union at this point, the Midwest and the Northeast have been our biggest demand areas."

"Recently, we did our first International order. We shipped 2 refrigerators to an public relations firm in Riga, Latvia. They are being used in a national ad campaign for the Phillip Morris-Latvia Corporation. The refrigerators are the grand prizes. They contacted us about a month ago after showing their clients our web site."

He believes that much of his success, both online and off, stems from the fact that he is offering a truly unique service. Antique Appliances is the only company in the US that specializes in the restoration of vintage refrigerators, and one of only a small number who restores vintage electric stoves.

Many companies are restoring gas stoves in the US because a gas stove is rather simple to repair and restore—no wiring, no moving parts, no chemicals involved. Electric stoves, however, are more complicated—a thorough knowledge of electrical systems is needed.

Refurbishing a refrigerator requires even more expertise: in addition to the electrical aspect, special certification is needed to handle the refrigerants and to clean the systems.

Most appliance restorers don´t have the required know-how or certification. But because Jowers TV & Appliances was already in the business of selling new appliances, John had a pre-assembled team of qualified servicemen and technicians.

John has no plans to take his new appliance sales online. While Internet sales for niche items like vintage appliances are skyrocketing, the competition to move new inventory is stiff. He knows he would likely only lose money trying to compete for online sales with a large outlet like Sears.com or JCPenney.com.

He does, however, believe that his new appliance sales will be helped as more and more manufacturers begin adding search engines that allow customers to find authorized dealers in their geographic area.

He has seen a few sales locally that have come to him via GE.com, and feels that this allows smaller dealers to profit without investing in building a site.

John´s dad still works two days a week at the company he started. He enjoys working on the appliances just like he did in ´55. Marvin saw the value in Cyberspace when John showed him the check from his first sale.

John acknowledges that, when he left for college, the last thing he thought he´d do was to come back to a small town and work in the family business. But his work experience while in college made him realize that he really enjoyed taking full responsibility for customer satisfaction, something that is vital to a family business, but often of secondary importance to larger stores.

"As a teenager, when I went out on deliveries with the other guys and there was a problem, believe me, the customer would address ME with their concerns because they knew I was my father´s son!"

"In college, I went to work part time in a local home improvement center. During my first week there, I saw my boss, the store´s assistant manager, make a woman mad over a can of red paint.

I went into his office and I said, `you may fire me for saying this, but you´ve done the worst thing you could have done. If you had given her another can of paint, she would have walked out of the store satisfied, and never said a word about it. But mark my words, you´ve made her mad, you didn´t give her another can of paint, and now she´s going to walk out of here and tell everyone in her bridge club and her church group, and you´ve probably lost 12 customers over a can of paint.´"

"I went home that night and asked myself what I wanted to do with my life, if I could really be happy somewhere climbing the corporate ladder but having no say-so about customer satisfaction, where you´ll always have to hand it off to another person. Suddenly, the family business seemed like the right choice."