As a teenager growing up in Oak Park, Ronald B. Lipson developed a passion for repairing wrecked vehicles. He was especially drawn to repainting cars.
“I found painting cars fascinating. While in high school, during the summer I got a job in a body shop as an assistant to the painter, basically masking cars and getting them ready for the painter,” Lipson says. “I liked that job; there was something about it that appealed to me.”
His summer body shop experience in 1970 prompted him to set up his own part-time business — painting cars on the driveway of his parents’ home.
“We didn’t have a garage, so I painted them early in the morning on the driveway — until the cops came one day and said, You can’t do this,” he recalls with a chuckle.
The Oak Park police had received complaints about the open-air paint shop, and young Lipson was out of business after two summers of work.
“I found it fascinating that you could take something that was broken and damaged, and in a couple of hours make it beautiful again,” he says.
His interest in repainting cars inspired him, while he was still in his teens, to invent and obtain a patent for a process that would revolutionize how vehicles were prepped for painting. That patent would later allow him to create a multimillion-dollar business along Russell Street in Detroit’s Eastern Market.
The companies he founded, RBL Plastics and its subsidiaries, Kwik Paint Products and Kwik Protection Products, employed as many as 75 workers.
In nearly four decades in business, Lipson registered close to 20 patents for his inventions that centered around the methods, devices, and tools used for painting and detailing in the automotive, marine, and trucking industries.
Historically, when auto manufacturers or body shops painted vehicles, they taped over chrome decals, insignias, or metal parts such as nameplates, bumpers, and door handles that would be exposed to paint spray. Applying and removing the tape was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process.
“You literally had to remove every part and put them back on later, or you had to mask them off,” Lipson says. “My method was quick and inexpensive. It was a plastic vacuum-formed piece that fitted over the part like a glove.”
Lipson was 18 years old when he filed an application for a patent for his invention, which used heated pliable styrene plastic and a vacuum to pull the material tight, into a mold, over exposed parts that needed to be covered before painting.
Lipson went on to obtain more than 20 patents for various devices and products used in auto painting, prepping, and shipping vehicles. His innovative process was marketed to Detroit’s Big Three automakers, thousands of body shops nationwide, and in more than a dozen countries where autos were manufactured.
The success he enjoyed was hardly foreseeable during his early school years. By his own admission, he wasn’t much of a student — nor was he interested in the classes he was required to attend.
“From elementary school to junior high to high school, I couldn’t understand why we were learning this stuff, and I couldn’t figure out how it really applied to me or how it was ever going to be part of my life,” he says. “So, once my brain kicked it out, I just started looking out the window.”
He wasn’t surprised when his counselor told him he wasn’t university material and suggested he apply to a community college when he graduated from high school.
“I always made it clear I wanted to work; I liked making money,” he remembers. “As a kid, I had a paper route. I always did something to make money. So I had a decision to make — did I want to work or go to school?”
Deciding to do both, Lipson enrolled at Oakland Community College and got a job working the midnight shift at a Massey Ferguson plant in Detroit, producing large tractors. Going to school in the morning and working midnights left time open on his money-making agenda, so he took a second job working afternoons in the record department at the E.J. Corvette discount store.
Eventually his heavy work schedule, which left little time for sleep, prompted Lipson to reassess his attitude and approach to education.
“I said to myself, if you’re going to go further in school, you might as well up your game the best you can,” he recalls. “Going to public school is different than college, where serious dollars are involved. I went to the University of Michigan and graduated with full honors with a business degree.”
Lipson says that, for as long as he can remember, he’s had an insatiable curiosity.
“I don’t know if that was inherited or what, but it was always there — the curiosity to figure out something, (discover) how to make something better, or (to find out) why this thing worked this way,” he says. “Those things were always happening in my mind. It was part of my life.”
Lipson believes that trait might have been passed down from his father, Larry Lipson, an engineer who worked with famed rocket pioneer Werner Von Braun in Huntsville, Ala., where Von Braun developed the Redstone rocket, among others, for the U.S. space program.
“My father died at a young age, at 58,” he says. “He also was an engineer at Bendix, and he was a watchmaker on the side. He had to figure out a lot of stuff, so there was some creativity there. I would say I inherited some of that from him.”
The inspiration for the plastic masking mold came out of hours of tedious work at his high school summer job at the North End Collision body shop on Woodward Avenue in Oak Park. As an assistant to the painter, the 16-year-old’s assignment was to prep vehicles for painting.
“Back then, on the side of the fenders, the Chevrolet Impala name was spelled out in nice script impaled in the panel, and they didn’t want you to take the letters off,” he recalls. “I would sit for hours on a 5-gallon bucket covering up letters with tape and masking the three-dimensional door handles. One day I said to myself, this is ridiculous, there must be a better way to do this.”
Eventually he approached the owner of a shop in the Packard plant in Detroit that made packaging and molds using a vacuum-forming process. Dan, the shop owner, was impressed with the plucky teenager and helped Lipson incorporate his ideas into the vacuum-forming process to produce a kit that would enclose decals, or lettering, and metal pieces on an automobile.
“It was quick and inexpensive,” he says. “You would have a plastic, vacuum-formed piece that fits over the part like a glove. A lot of guys wouldn’t want to help out a young guy with an idea, but Dan did, and he worked with me.”
Lipson says his parents and fellow workers prodded him to shop his invention around, and suggested he start with General Motors. Meanwhile, an uncle, a Detroit school principal, sent him to see a patent attorney who helped the teenager register his invention.
The attorney told him that most people who come up with a good idea don’t know what to do with it, and explained that most patents awarded to inventors have no commercial value.
“But what did I know?” he says. “I was just a kid living in an apartment with my mom and dad.”
Lipson is fuzzy on the details, but says he somehow came up with the name of a paint engineer at a GM plant in Lansing, got him on the phone, and convinced the engineer to allow him to demonstrate his invention.
The engineer told him to bring enough samples to put them on cars that were damaged in the manufacturing process and had to be repainted.
Lipson said he arrived early at the Lansing plant and met the engineer, who took him to the paint area and left him to apply his masking kit to vehicles being prepped for painting.
“I’d never been to a car plant before. The engineer went off to do his job and I worked on about 25 cars, putting my covers on before they were painted,” Lipson says. “At the end of the day, around 4:30 p.m., the engineer came back, asked how it went, and thanked me for coming in and showing them my process.”
Lipson says he drove home not knowing if he had wasted his time going to Lansing.
“I get home, I’m at the dinner table, and my parents ask, How did it go? And I said, I don’t know,” he recalls. “My mother, Rosalie, said, What do you mean you don’t know? You were there all day. What did the engineer say?
“I told her that he didn’t spend any time with me, other than getting me going in the repair shop and saying thank you when I left.”
When he got home from work the next day, his mother said he had received a phone call from GM. The message was from his contact at the Lansing plant, who wanted to place an order for 10,000 of his plastic covers. He also wanted to know how quickly he could get them.
“I only had 10 or 20 of these things, and he wants 10,000,” Lipson recalls. “Thank God I’m not wired in a way that I would go stick my head in the toilet and start throwing up.”
With the help of Dan, his benefactor at the Packard plant, he was able to fill the order. Lipson says since the masks cost pennies to produce, he only charged about 15 cents apiece for them.
“The money didn’t mean anything,” he says. “It was the idea that if GM liked it, then (I) might really have something here.”
Next up for the youthful entrepreneur was the body shop repair business. He gave samples of his cover kit to metro Detroit’s largest distributor of products for body shops to pass out, and he was flooded with orders.
At that point, Lipson realized he needed to fill in the gaps in his education.
“The engineering part was already in my mind, but I didn’t know how to figure out the business end, so I went to U-M and got a business degree,” he says.
With the help of two employees and a local company, he continued making his Quik Covers while in school and after graduation. He also worked for more than a decade in the paint divisions at Chrysler Corp. and the chemical company BASF, getting experience until he thought he was ready to start his own business.
Lipson founded Kwik Paint Products in 1985, and later moved into a 65,000-square-foot building in Eastern Market. Two other businesses were operating in the building, as well.
Nearly 40 years later, in October 2023, he sold his business to Morgenthaler Private Equity, which is based in Cleveland and Boston, for an undisclosed price. After the sale was completed, he retired.
“If you had told me when I was in junior high or high school (that I was going) to end up creating something unique where (my) ideas became patents that built an international business, I would have said that’s not going to happen,” says the 72-year-old Lipson. “But I succeeded — and, as I sit here, I feel pretty good.”
