The Petrolicious Holiday Gift Guide, Part 3: Last-Minute Shopping
To browse and purchase the items in this guide, please visit the Shop page, here
Procrastination can feel like the right choice in the moment—clips of kittens or Maserati Birdcages are surely more entertaining than memorizing the glossary of your biology textbook—but studying inefficiently all night for an exam for a class you haven’t been to in weeks isn’t a great byproduct of watching YouTube for a mindless couple of hours instead of cracking the spine on your textbook at a reasonable hour, and showing up for the holidays with a bunch of stuff you cobbled together from the barren shelves of a late-December CVS isn’t exactly the optimal gift giving move—the slightest waver before the “thank you” will confirm the sins of trying to pass of a floppy bag of marshmallows and a chintzy Rudolf ornament as thoughtful presents.
But we get it, it’s a hectic time of the year. You put something off for the immediate future and all of sudden your calendar reminds you that Nana’s Christmas party is next week. There are options for the last-minute crowd though, and not all of them involve a frantic scramble to the shops where overweight men paid to dress up as Santa judge you for being so late with the same gift-wrapped box of chocolates you rushed to the store to buy last year. Petrolicious doesn’t want you to feel like this, so we’ve put together a selection of last-minute items for our customers in the United States—of course, the assortment below is available to others, but orders may not ship in time for Europeans for instance.
Our Petrolicious Originals line has been grown recently with the introduction of our first series of officially branded hats, and we still have plenty of T-shirts left from our national racing heritage collection, which feature the colors and significant racing numbers from Japan, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States. The piles are shrinking daily though, and once they’re gone that’s it. If you know somebody who checks our pages daily and has an affinity for cars from a certain country, these make for awesome, and most importantly, relevant gifts. Sticker packs for stockings anyone?
We’ve always been big fans of the well-crafted minimalist artwork from Remove Before, and besides having chosen a group of very poster-worthy cars that includes 2002 Turbos and Porsche RSR Turbo 2.1s, they offer a clean and uncluttered boost to the otherwise bland aesthetics of a white wall. If you know somebody with a glaring blankness on their walls and a penchant for badass German classics, look no further. It’s not all Teutonic though, as you’ll find Ferraris and more in the full collection.
While the above prints make use of monochrome almost exclusively, the work of Ricardo Santos has plenty of contrast as well, and his art bursts with color. However, his vibrant palette is simply an extension of the selected cars and their liveries, not a bombastic and random assortment of saturation. These prints call to mind the bold large-format posters of the 1960s and ’70s, and even if we set aside that nostalgia the pieces speak for themselves as masterful examples of graphic design.
Embodying the idea of a perfect stocking stuffer for the younger motoring enthusiasts in your life, toys from Candylab are a far cry from the flimsy Happy Meal-esque options out there. Kids can bash these together to their hearts’ content, or they can take a more reserved route and send them flying down a makeshift ramp into the sleeping dog. Perhaps your youngster will set up a quaint photoshoot like the product shots we received, but we aren’t counting on it. Whatever duties they’re deployed to though, the cars look great from the adult point of view as well, so you won’t mind seeing them strewn around the carpet.
The cars and trucks from Playforever are very similar to the above, but they feature a slightly more rugged construction and tend to have a lot more roundness in their overall shape. In other words, perfect for the kind of ACME-inspired stunts these toys will inevitably perform.
We love just about everything made by the people behind Curb, and from their artwork to their apparel to their keychains, it’s all part of a big celebration centered around driving and the joys of the myriad ways we go about it. And their spin-off brand, The Manual Gearbox Preservation Society, is a cause I’m sure we can all get behind.
INK follows a similar philosophy to the prints from Remove Before, focusing on a crisp presentation of iconic cars that speak for themselves rather than adding anything that might detract from the pure form of these highly functional machines. We love a nice body-in-white too, so the fact that the liveries have been stripped offers a new perspective on these legends.
To browse and purchase the items in this guide, please visit the Shop page, here
