This year marks the tenth anniversary of the SEMA News "35 Under 35" program. When SEMA launched the feature, the goals were simple: to identify and encourage rising industry talent and introduce that talent to the wider aftermarket. SEMA had no idea how popular the feature would become.
The honorees include young people who represent a broad range of disciplines. Engineers, product developers, builders, marketing and communications professionals, racers, sales people—you name the category, and there are young experts pushing our industry forward with fresh answers to traditional problems and novel (often high-tech) ways of reaching new heights.
In fact, amid the explosion of technologies in a digital age, SEMA's "35'ers" aren't much different from the industry's early pioneers whose tinkering, experimenting and innovating laid the foundations of the aftermarket we know now. Today's innovators may have exchanged mobile devices for slide rules, CAD data and lasers for pencils and sketches, and social media for print communications, but they're no less enthusiastic about the automobile's future than their predecessors were.
Meet SEMA's 2022 class of next-gen talent in SEMA News Magazine.