About Us

Our Story is PRETYQL….

Automobiles have always been important investments to many people.  They represent the freedom of the individual.  We are a nation on wheels, obsessed with hunks of metal that, like magic carpets, take us anywhere we want to go, whenever we want to go there. (Life, 1996). Automobiles have changed the shape of our society.  They are, today, an integral part of us.  They have influenced our society and have been, at times, a reflection of it.  Cars have become so much like us, that occasionally, they are us, becoming an extension of ourselves and as a result, we communicate through them.  People use them as territorial markers, emblems, symbols, and as instruments of privacy.  Autos have become extensions of expressions.  People communicate non verbally through their cars, bumper stickers, and as demonstrated on WhatAPlate.com, via their vanity license plates.  There are many different reflections of people on their license plates, some funny, some not, but they all share a common thread: a unique meaning or story.

Did you ever wonder where all these people get the ideas for their vanity license plates?  Have you stared at a license plate and then figured it out, only to say to yourself, “What a plate!”?  Well we did.  We are not talking about the simple ones with people’s names on them.  No, we mean the ones that obviously have a story behind them…the ones that show some creativity…the ones that we wish we had thought of ourselves…the ones that mean something special to the owner.   We want to share these stories with the world, hence how the site was born.

It all started back in 1994-95, when we were one of the first colleges to have internet access and was given a “student homepage” account on the school server.  That first love of the internet quickly turned from a student homepage about ourselves, into several web pages about our friend’s cool cars.   No digital cameras, just good, old film cameras, some black and white school scanners, creativity, and HTML 101 skills.  Fast forward a year or two, that student homepage quickly turned into the infamous site known as “BumpStop.com, the Coolest Rides on the Net!” It soon became the internet hub of cars, one of Yahoo’s first and popular entries in their “Automotive” directory.  The site expanded, we started custom license plate section, using “Microsoft Windows Paint” to create pictures of vanity license plates that owners sent us to post on the site.

We would also scour the streets, local car shows, and parking lots for cool plates.  The  “BumpStop Plates” particular section of the website was extremely fun and people really loved it.  That also morphed into school video projects where we started to interview these folks and get their stories about their plates and post them online.  Fast forward another 12-15 years, now they can post a plate online themselves using a few clicks of a button and phone.  Where’s your plate?

Share your story with us, upload your vanity and create your own automotive vanity for the world to see!  #whataplate

Enjoy the stories, enjoy the rides.  Share with the world.

Regards,

WhatAPlate.com Staff
Garrett Bragalone and Kristoffer Knapp