You might wonder how a refrigerator repair business would be linked to the world of high tech. The relationship is no mystery to John Jowers, creator and operator of AntiqueAppliances.com. A line of work that started almost as a lark grew so quickly by word of mouth in his local area that Jowers realized he had a winner and sought some way to go national with it. High tech was his answer.

John Jowers’s dad, Marvin, got into the appliance business after World War II. In its earliest years, the business was mostly a repair business; in the 1950s, the elder Jowers opened a franchise to sell appliances. John learned about appliances working alongside his father, and turned them into his career in the 1980s. Located in a vacation community in Georgia, the store and its employees experienced seasonal down time each year, until John and crew turned that time into paydirt.

After restoring their first several antique refrigerators and stoves, which seemed to fly out the door, John Jowers realized there was a much broader market for antique appliances that actually work. His challenge was in finding a way to tap into that market. His answer: AntiqueAppliances.com. He enlisted the aid of a professional web developer and launched his site, which gets over 500,000 hits every month.

Today, AntiqueAppliances.com not only restores old appliances but they sell parts for older units, they do appraisals, and they can put you in touch with modern reproductions of the vintage pieces. Jowers’s team will even customize your antique to match your décor perfectly. You can learn all about the business at the website, which tells you everything you want to know about his store, including store hours for the brick-and-mortar location. And if you just can’t make it to Clayton, Georgia to see his inventory, you can browse his aisles online.

How did one old refrigerator bring him to this point? In a word – the Web. The know-how of his web developer has brought thousands of visits to the site and more than a hundred sites link to AntiqueAppliances. For Jowers, the marriage of early 20th century consumer products and 21st century internet technology is a happy union. In fact, the website has become a business of its own, accepting paid advertising from others who want to buy or sell antique appliances.