Bestop has been sewing canvas roofs for Jeeps since 1954. Seventy-one years later, the company supplies factory soft tops for the Ford Bronco, built the original roofs for North American Spec Land Rover Defenders, and has touched products from GM, Dodge, Kia, Polaris, and Kenworth. The path from a defunct Colorado schoolhouse to the OEM assembly line runs straight through one vehicle: the square-headlight YJ Wrangler.
Founder Tom Bradley started with seven people stitching CJ tops in the mid-1950s. The operation now employs more than 500, runs multiple assembly plants, and maintains a full design and development center in Sterling Heights, Michigan. That puts them deep in supplier country, minutes from the Big Three’s engineering campuses.
The YJ, launched in 1987, changed everything. Jeep didn’t just buy fabric from Bestop. It handed over the entire soft top program — cut-and-sew, metal frames, latches, the works — and had Bestop ship finished assemblies directly to the Brampton, Canada, plant.
Senior Program Manager Rick Troeger called it the company’s “first introduction as a tier one supplier into the OEM industry.” That contract set the template. From the YJ through the TJ, JK, and current JL, every manual folding soft top on a Wrangler has been a Bestop design.
The automaker sends a vehicle with an open hole in the roof. Bestop engineers the solution, tools it, builds it, and drops it onto the line.
One of the best stories involves the so-called LJ — the long-wheelbase TJ Wrangler Unlimited sold from 2004 to 2006, a truck still revered for its blend of old-school open-air character and Cherokee-length stability. Bestop’s team cracked the roof design during an off-the-clock Saturday session, improvising with existing tooling. That weekend hack became a production part installed in Toledo.
At the time, Bestop was already cranking out roughly 300 standard TJ tops a day. The company’s fingerprints extend well beyond Jeep. During the brief 1990s window when Land Rover sold the Defender 90 in the United States, Bestop-made soft tops were fitted to the trucks at port before dealer delivery.
Certain Chevy Camaros and Dodge Vipers wore Bestop convertible tops. Kenworth called on the company for cab interior components. And when Ford resurrected the Bronco, Bestop got the soft top contract after what Troeger described as an intensive collaboration involving daily engineering reviews, proving ground visits, and crash testing.
Now private-equity-owned, Bestop sits atop a portfolio that includes Baja Designs lights, PRP Seats, and Softopper truck caps. The corporate structure is pure 2020s roll-up strategy, but the engineering culture still leans on small-team problem solving — the Saturday skunkworks mentality that produced the LJ roof.
The product range tells you where the money is heading. At last year’s SEMA, Bestop debuted a power-folding soft top for the Bronco that starts around $5,000 before installation and claims to be quieter than Ford’s own hardtop. That is a long way from drilling 20 holes into a YJ body tub to mount an aftermarket replacement.
Bestop still catalogs covers for vintage rigs — CJs, early Broncos, International Scouts — but nobody pretends the margins are comparable. One $5,000 power top bundled into a new-vehicle finance deal is worth a stack of $200 bikini tops for 50-year-old trucks that may or may not have straight body panels left.
The tension at the heart of Bestop’s business is the tension running through the entire aftermarket: grow up with the OEMs or stay scrappy with the enthusiasts. Bestop chose both, and so far, it has pulled it off.
The company that started sewing canvas in a schoolhouse now runs crash-test programs with Ford and ships production parts into multiple assembly plants across North America. Few aftermarket brands have made that jump without losing their identity. Bestop managed it by being indispensable — the company that could build a roof nobody else wanted to engineer, sometimes on a Saturday morning with nobody watching.
Share this Story