Fortune's Wheels

"Rims are the big thing now," says Williams, an engineer for the federal government.

"Rims are more of a fashion statement rather than an automotive one," says Peter MacGillivray of the Specialty Equipment Market Association, the California-based agency that promotes and tracks the $31 billion after-market car modification industry. "People have really bought into the idea that their car is a reflection of themselves, their personality."

There is no precise genesis for rims trade, but there is certainly precedent. Americans have a long history of turning the ordinary into the stylish and perhaps outrageously expensive -- dungarees become designer jeans, sneakers become Air Jordans, prescription sunglasses morph into Oakleys, sweaty track suits evolve into DKNY loungewear, a cuppa joe turns into the Starbucks franchise.

For rims, the beginning was about five or six years ago among members of the West Coast-based "tuning" culture. These are guys who gear out their cars with performance engines, fins, new grills, and then somebody came up with some custom rims. Their chrome-laden extravagances began popping up in rap videos and in movies like "The Fast and the Furious," and then there was MTV's "Pimp My Ride," and suddenly Sly Stallone and Adrien Brody and Ozzy Osbourne were rolling with them. Glossy magazines like Dub, Lowrider and Top Tuners are now filled with dozens of pages of rim ads. Diablo, D'Vinci, Hipnotic, Lexani, Polo, Player, Zenetti -- the list of manufacturers grows by the day.

"It started out as a hip-hop thing, but now I get calls from everyone from rappers to movie producers to some lawyer's secretary, setting up an appointment for him," says Ernie Boehm, who designed Shaq's wheels for Blingz of Beverly Hills. Boehm, who also designs for the less expensive sister company Blingz Wheels, makes limited series of each design, say 350, like etchings.

There are fads, of course within a $3 billion trade. Spinners, the insets within the wheel that keep turning after you stop, have peaked. Floaters, insets that remain still while you drive -- giving the appearance the wheel isn't turning at all -- are the new hottie.

Kitmani Rollins, president of Silver Spring-based Automotiverhythms.com, says rims only recently caught on in Washington. "In D.C. you didn't get a lot of bling, compared to New York, Atlanta, L.A., Texas." One problem, he says, might be the poor condition of the streets. "D.C. streets are so jacked up, I think it scared some people off here."

Now P. Diddy is coming out with his "Sean John" limited-edition rims -- going for $700 to $3,000 each. General Motors is planning to offer rims right in the showroom.

Ahmadi isn't worried.

Rims are a personal item, he says, and people want the experience of picking them out themselves, from a ton of options, not just four or five at the dealership.

He bought this place, a rundown former auto-parts store on a busy street in Oxon Hill, in early 2003. He ripped out the insides and turned it into a primary colors playroom.

The side walls in the front half of the store are bright yellow, the floor red. Dozens of spit-shined rims float in black or chrome racks, stacked eight or nine feet tall. High overhead, bright fluorescent lights are suspended from a black ceiling. Track lighting spills onto the rims lining the walls. The back half of the store, where the walls switch to red, is stocked with stereos, grills, alarms and the like.