Tucson Kei — a showroom for the cars, a brief for the work.
Arizona’s only owner-operated Kei dealer — Japanese mini trucks, vans, and SUVs imported from auction in Japan, then fully reconditioned for the Sonoran desert and backed by a 12-month / 12,000-mile labor warranty. The site is part inventory magazine, part trust-building brief: the differentiator isn’t that they import, it’s that they recondition, and every page makes that legible.
The brief
Kei vehicles are niche enough that most buyers travel from out of state — for many, the site is the lot. Other importers ship a car from Japan and list it; Tucson Kei tears into every vehicle, replaces fluids and brakes and tires, recharges the A/C for 110°F summers, and warranties their work. The site had to telegraph that difference in seconds, host a real inventory with deep filtering by make/type/condition, and feed listings programmatically from the owner’s sourcing pipeline.
The approach
- Custom WordPress theme with a `kei_car` post type and three custom taxonomies — make (Daihatsu / Honda / Mitsubishi / Suzuki), vehicle type (truck / van / SUV / Jimny), and condition — so visitors can drill in any direction and the URLs match the way enthusiasts think about the cars
- A four-step How It Works section on the home that puts the actual differentiator above the fold: source from Japan auctions → fully recondition in-shop → handle customs + Arizona title → hand over keys with a 12-month / 12,000-mile labor warranty
- Custom kei-car-api WordPress plugin (bearer-token auth, SHA-256 hashing, rate-limited, full request/response audit log) so the owner can push new inventory programmatically — image URLs auto-download into the media library, taxonomies auto-create as new makes appear
- Nine-plus marketing pages that go deep on the things buyers actually ask about — Arizona Kei laws, the reconditioning checklist, parts and accessories, service offerings — instead of one shallow inventory page
- Light Japanese typography on the site (ゴールデンウィーク banner, 軽自動車 footer mark) plus a real Golden Week closure system so the owner can take the week off without anyone wondering why inquiries went quiet
- Site Kit by Google for analytics; Yoast for schema.org structured data on every inventory listing so the cars surface properly in Google’s vehicle-listing results
“Other importers ship you a car from Japan and call it done. We tear into every vehicle, recondition it for Arizona conditions, and back our work with a warranty — because that’s what we’d want if we were buying.”
— Tucson Kei
The outcome
A site that does the trust-building work for an owner-operator. The home page leads with the four-step process, the inventory feeds in via the REST API as new vehicles land in the shop, and the marketing pages have answers ready for every "is this even legal in Arizona?" question. The owner takes Mon/Wed/Fri appointments, not phone calls about basics.