My brother works as an auto tech, and when it comes to auto parts, he’ll only purchase at NAPA. The reliable parts and nationwide warranties mean he’s a regular at his local store; even in a metro of over one million, they know him by name.

NAPA stores are easy to recognize. With that royal blue fascia and bright yellow hexagon, the branding is so distinct you can see it from the highway, flying by at 70 miles an hour.

Which makes it somewhat ironic that when I visit Kalona Auto Parts, a NAPA store, at the end of July, it's almost incognito, but for a banner on the south side.

It’s also huge.

You see, in June the Helmuth family closed the Wellman Auto Parts store and the Kalona Auto Parts store on Hwy 22 and moved the contents of both to a single location on the corner of Hwy 1 and B Ave in Kalona – the former home of The Appliance Barn.

This 16,780 square-foot building offers them four times the space the previous stores had, and they really needed it.

“We were bursting at the seams and that’s why we moved,” Lisa Helmuth says.

That, and maintaining two auto parts stores so close to each other was taxing.

“It felt like a lot of work to have [Wellman] open when it’s only seven miles away,” she says.

When I enter the store, aisles of merchandise open out around me. Five-gallon buckets of tractor fluid are stacked on pallets, socket wrenches in every size fill an aisle, and containers of Armor All and engine oil line the shelves. Behind the service desk, parts professionals are waiting to look up the part I need to replace on my passenger door.

Lisa, husband Loren, and son Dominic offer me the full tour. Most of it is the enormous stockroom, which is how the majority of ground-level space is being allocated.

“Just how many parts do you have?” I ask as I scope out the aisles of racks and bins. It reminds me of being in the university library, scanning for digits of the Dewey Decimal System, only for auto parts instead of books.

“I mean, if you include all the itty-bitty stuff,” Dominic says, mentally calculating. “It depends on how you count something.”

Back in the office, I look it up: NAPA’s catalog contains more than one million available parts. That goes a long way in explaining why it’s taking the auto parts store a couple months to transfer inventory from the old locations to the new one.

“We don’t want to just grab and dump,” Lisa explains. “We take a whole section of parts, we bring it over, and then we organize it right away, and then go get another section, so it’s not chaos.”

Kalona Auto Parts had been in the same space for 38 years, so there’s also that element of, “What’s this?” that homeowners might recognize from moving out of a place after so many years. It’s easy for the dark corners to become an archive of the forgotten, and now those items must be dealt with too.

Which leads to some interesting history. The Helmuth family has owned the Kalona Auto Service property on Hwy 22 since 1974. Loren’s uncle sold it to his dad, Lynn, in 1988. Back then it was just a service center, but Loren grew the parts business, and in 2021 they separated the parts and service – Loren’s brothers operate the service center these days.

So file that away in the back of your head: Kalona Auto Parts and Kalona Auto Service are actually two separate businesses with separate ownership. One call does not do it all.

The spacious new ‘barn’ location is helping the Helmuths’ dozen employees get their 10,000 steps in each day as they stock and retrieve parts. The system here is an improvement over the previous locations, where parts professionals had a harder time doing their jobs.

“People that we had working for us had a really hard time putting parts away because there wasn’t space, and then stuff would get put away incorrectly,” Lisa says.

“We’d have three locations for just one line, you couldn’t have it all in one spot,” Loren adds.

Now parts are organized logically and stocked correctly, all on one floor, which creates efficiency – and an improved customer experience.

“We’re just going to be able to do more,” Lisa says.

Once they’re comfortably moved in, the Helmuths have ideas for future improvements. They’d like to put in a garage door so they can park delivery vehicles inside during the winter. They’d like to improve the shipping and receiving area. They’d like to improve the parking areas. But that’s stuff for years down the road.

For now, they’re looking forward to getting settled. Their hope is to hold an open house sometime before the end of the year. And there’s a good chance that when they do, they’ll have a new name to go with it.

The Parts Barn.

I can’t wait to see it on the signage, easily recognizable while cruising down Hwy 1.

Kalona Auto Parts (NAPA)

101 B Ave., Kalona

Monday-Friday, 7:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m.-1 p.m.

319-656-2820