Learning Center

So, we just got our hands on a 2011 F550 that was a heavy equipment service truck.

The truck had belonged to a heavy equipment dealer. This company installs TigerTough seat covers on their trucks when they're brand new, so we were pretty excited to see how everything looked.

It was pretty clear this thing wasn't somebody's grocery-getter. Even if you ignored the service body and the crane.

But what do you expect from a service truck that's eight years old? Broken equipment is never clean and rarely easy to get to!

This truck had over 235,000+ miles on it and hadn't been touched since it was decommissioned.

But what does it look like under the covers? Are they worth the money?

We peeled the covers off to see how everything had fared over 235,000 miles of being on the road, eight years of bouncing across construction sites, and countless dirty mechanic entries and exits.

Those pictures pretty much speak for themselves, don't they?

The buyer of this truck technically could have spent a ton of time and money getting the seats shampooed. That would have taken out some of the stains.

The shampooing wouldn't have touched the wear on the edge of the seat from eight years of getting in and out, though. You don't see any because the seat covers prevented it from happening. The original owner invested a little bit in preventing a costly problem

Seems like a good idea, doesn't it?

If you operate a service truck (or a bunch of them), seat covers are a pretty cheap way to keep the inside of your truck in good shape. They're inexpensive and often overlooked, but you just see what they'll do.

Save Your Service Truck.

We get it a lot; people looking for seat covers for vehicles that we don’t cover, crazy colors, or other really custom stuff that we don’t do.

So here’s who we’re right for and who we’re not.

First off, let’s start off with who we’re not right for. That way, if you’re in that category, you don’t have to waste any time.

If you’re looking for seat covers for a passenger car or SUV, a side-by-side, or a custom dog bed, there’s a good chance that we’re not your best bet. If it’s the dog bed one, we’re definitely not a good choice. 

We're not the right people if you’re looking for seat covers with the logos of your favorite sports team, vehicle manufacturer, or motorcycle (yeah, that one) on them. We do offer embroidery as an option to customize your covers, but we don’t do any licensing of copyrighted logos. Honestly, it’s really expensive, and we’d rather put the cost into good materials instead of a cool logo.

If you want seat covers that are two-tone, alligator skin or have crazy colors, we’re not the right seat cover. The same applies if you want extra foam padding, heated covers, or options like that. 

If you’re looking for a seat cover that you can quickly pop on to take the dog to the vet or trees to the dump, we’re probably not right. Our seat covers are going to take 30-60 minutes to put on and about half that to take off. So this one is your call.

Finally, the last thing we aren’t is cheap. And that’s for three major reasons.

1. We won’t send our manufacturing out of the USA. We’ve passed up opportunities to cut our labor costs to a quarter of what they are by sending everything across the border to get made. We’d rather pay American workers a fair wage. 
2. We use the best, toughest materials we can get so our customers get the best seat covers possible.
3. Every seat cover is designed specifically for a vehicle. That involves bringing trucks to our factory and spending hours designing the best seat cover possible.

If we’re not right for you, no hard feelings. We’d rather you find out now than after you spent your hard-earned dough and ended up disappointed.

Now, who we ARE right for.

We make seat covers for work. And by work, we’re talking blue-collar, hard work. Contractors, pest control, last-mile delivery, service trucks, and law enforcement, just to name a few industries. 

The people who use our seat covers are typically doing some of the following:

• Multiple entry/exits every day.
• Getting dirty
• Wearing tools and/or weapons on their belts
• And, most often, a combination of all three.

TigerTough Ironweave seat covers are made from 1000-denier CORDURA, some of the toughest material we can find to wrap around your seats. In fact, it has a higher abrasion rating than Kevlar. We use it because while it’s almost impossible to tear, it’s easy to work with, it’s water-resistant, and it’s made in the USA.

You’ll probably notice that our covers have no decorative stitching (aside from the optional embroidery, if you choose that) and very few seams. That’s because seams and stitching are the weakest points in anything sewn together. Since our customers use their vehicles as tools in their toolboxes, we’re doing everything possible to eliminate weak points.

Actually, a customer who goes by the name R00ster said it best. He’s a farmer from Virginia and says

R00ster goes on to say he throws grease guns, screwdrivers, and fencing tools (even his chain saw) on his seats and doesn’t worry about it anymore.

We build seat covers for people like R00ster. The people whose day-to-day jobs are the ones that make the lights come on, the food hit your plate, the gas come out of the pumps, and the packages show up on time. Ours are some of the best work truck seat covers on the market, and we're darn proud of that.

If you’re looking for a seat cover that isn’t luxury but most definitely is built for work, TigerTough is the best choice. 

Both. How's that for an answer?

What Are You Doing?

If you're slapping some purple, fuzzy, Tweetie Bird covers on your Camry, they're probably an accessory. Even if you're the kind of person that gets bored with a plain, boring, gray interior like everyone else has and wants to spice things up with an epic camo pattern, they're still an accessory.

When your seat covers become a part of your work truck, that's when the story changes. When your truck's covers are in place to prevent your day-to-day from tearing up the seats in your vehicle, then you can start calling them a necessity.

Construction workers, linemen, roustabouts, and roughnecks know what we're talking about. They've got work to do, they don't have time to worry about keeping their truck sparkly clean. Not when you've got some of the dirtiest, toughest jobs out there. Those fleet managers know that quality seat covers are a necessity if they want to get anything for their trucks when they're done with them.

Travis from Black Hawk Energy Services talked about it here: An Extra $3000 In Resale Value

Bryan from Anderson & Wood Construction has proved they're a necessity here: North Dakota Construction Trucks Look Like New

And Dan from the Hollis, NH Police Department would tell you they're a necessity: Here Is Why

So often, fleet managers and owners look at work truck seat covers as an accessory. They're right if they're just trying to make their trucks look cooler, but if they're committed to making their fleet as efficient and cost-effective as possible, seat covers for their work trucks are necessity

Interested in seeing if they'd help you have better equipment, happier drivers, and more money? Grab a sample and let us know what you think.

I'd Like A Sample

Construction is a tough, dirty job. When you’re a complete utilities contractor helping develop the oil fields of North Dakota, you know that all too well. Bryan, the fleet manager for Anderson & Wood Construction, knows that. That’s why he was pretty impressed when the seats in the 2014 and 2015 trucks that were being sold were in perfect condition. Because the covers had held up so well, he decided to wash and re-use the covers from their 2015 trucks on their new ones. They could have used the 2014 covers as well but they wouldn't fit on the new trucks. Take a look at the before and after pictures

Check out how dirty the seats are after five years in the field. They peeled the cover back to see what the seats looked like.

A quick vacuum job on the seats and a good cleaning of the rest of the truck. Bryan also sent a picture of a 2012 F150 that came in to sell. This picture shows the seats immediately after taking the covers off.

These tan seats haven't even been vacuumed yet.

You're looking at a 2012 F150 with 123,000 miles.

Want to preserve your truck's interior? Check out the best seat covers for trucks and find a brand that fits your needs and budget.

Black Hawk Energy Services' trucks are on the job 24 hours a day servicing oil wells in the Williston, ND area oil fields. They implemented TigerTough seat covers as a part of their preventative maintenance plan and saw the resale value of their trucks increase dramatically. As Travis Hjort put it, “I’ve got nothing but positive things to say”.

Black Hawk Energy Services' logo embroidered on their seat covers. Black Hawk Energy Services is a 24/7 oil well-servicing company in Williston, ND. They do the tough, greasy, oily stuff once a well is fracked and running. As Travis Hjort, the Shop Foreman puts it “that’s when we come in and basically get it as dirty and grimy as we can and try to complete the well as fast as well can.”

Since they’re always on call, Travis says that it would be easier to count the engine off hours rather than the engine on hours on their equipment. We’ve been working with Black Hawk Energy Services since 2014, so we sat down with Travis to get his input on TigerTough seat covers.

Before we got to know each other, Black Hawk Energy Services was just ruining their trucks because they didn’t know there was another option and were too busy to look for one. If you’re familiar with the oil fields, you’ll understand. They go flat out until something breaks, fix it, and go flat out again. While this was working, Travis wasn’t happy with it because, as he puts it, “It looks like a rat’s been living in the seats for the last four years.”

They were getting a really low valuation on their crew trucks when the fleet buyback company came to evaluate the vehicles. The representative from the company couldn’t even get in the vehicles because they weren’t comfortable getting into a truck whose seats were covered in oil and grease and were completely torn up. They found that the buyers would give them an estimate based off of a visual inspection of the trucks.

Once Travis and his team got their feet underneath them, they started implementing a better preventative maintenance plan which included installing TigerTough seat covers on new trucks before they ever went into service. This meant that no oil-covered technician ever came in direct contact with the factory seats.

Now, Travis says, they go about their job without worrying about the interiors of their trucks. They can grease the entire carrier for a rig and rush to the next job, jumping into the truck covered in grease, dirt, and whatever else you pick up around an oil well. They wipe the seat covers off the best they can and keep doing the stuff that makes them money.

When a rig is down and they can take time out for a service day they’ll pull the trucks’ covers off, wash them, and put them back on, leaving a clean truck for the next crew. Travis says he is at the point where he is analyzing when to get rid of vehicles and equipment rather than running them into the ground. Once a truck gets to the end of its useful life with them, he appreciates the fact that he can take the seat covers off and have brand new seats underneath. While Travis attributes their new preventative maintenance planning and better schedules to the $3000 increase in their trucks’ resale values, he says that seat covers are a big part of it. Here is what he has to say about it:

“I’m sure it’s not all TigerTough, but in some respect it really is. When you open the door, you see a brand new seat in a truck with 170,000 miles, but you’re like, oh it’s been taken care of.” “I think first appearance, you can’t really deny that first appearance, psychologically for the human brain, it’s true. When you can actually get, the used car guy can actually jump into the vehicle instead of being like, oh, I’ve got my nice pants on, like not a chance. Yeah 5K, check that box for 5K max or whatever, when they get in there and fire it up and do a function test and feel comfortable, that’s huge.”

Discover all the ways seat covers can save you money.

M. J. Electric, LLC (MJE) is an electrical services contractor from Iron Mountain, MI that we’ve worked with for years. They perform an amazing range of services including power transmission lines, power distribution lines, substations, and storm response, along with other specialized services. They’ve been doing this for over 60 years, and we’re proud to have been working with them for a few of those years.

Some of the MJE drivers put 100,000 miles on their trucks in a year, and we’re not talking about all smooth-sailing highway miles. They are inspecting new power lines or navigating the wreckage of a storm. Their trucks truly get pushed to the maximum of their abilities over the course of their life.

The folks at M. J. Electric were introduced to TigerTough seat covers when one of their service truck drivers bought a set and put it on his truck, and it’s taken off from there. They were impressed because they’d been burning through cheap seat covers and weren’t happy with that.

Instead of patching up seats or wrecking cheap covers like they used to, M. J. Electric is now putting TigerTough seat covers on those trucks and not worrying about losing money to damaged seats anymore.

Karl, the Parts Coordinator at the corporate office, said they had a truck that they were getting rid of come through, and “We took [the seat covers] off and the guys said, 'The seats are just like new in there!'"

Karl told us that a fleet owner that isn’t currently using seat covers should seriously look at it because they certainly seem to hold up and that helps keep the value of the truck.

M. J. Electric has proved the benefits of using quality seat covers in their trucks and has started using them in their MJE Drilling trucks as well.

When you're managing a fleet of vehicles, you probably don't think about something as simple as a seat cover being able to erase some pains. There are many ways that using custom seat covers can benefit your company and make you a more effective fleet manager. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Improve Your Resale Value

This is probably the biggest one. (That's why its number 1). Using seat protection on your fleet vehicles will definitely improve the resale value of your vehicles. By installing TigerTough custom seat covers when the truck is new, (Your upfitter can do it for you) you preserve the seats from all dirt, grease, and wear that happens over the life of the truck.

2. Improve Driver Morale

Nobody wants to get into a vehicle that has a broken down, worn out interior. Custom covers prevent that. TigerTough's Ironweave fabric will stand up to the abuse that a fleet vehicle takes far better than the factory upholstery will. Your trucks will look better and your drivers will be happier because of that.

3. Save Money on Maintenance

Investing a few hundred dollars in proactive seat protection will pay off big time. According to Law and Order Magazine, small problems will quickly become big problems. Once a vehicle starts to have a few minor issues (a light not working, a cracked windshield, a torn seat) the operator starts to care less for the vehicle and neglect will result in bigger problems.

4. Customize Your Fleet and Promote Your Brand

This is where the custom comes in. TigerTough seat covers are available with custom embroidery so you can promote your company's image, a safety message, or whatever you wish. There is very little that we can't do to customize your seat covers.

5. Be More Comfortable

Over time, the foam in the seats of a vehicle start to break down and the seat loses its support. TigerTough covers hold the seat in place, offering more support and comfort over the life of the vehicle.

Check out all the reasons heavy duty seat covers will benefit your fleet.