The restomod movement had a family before it had a name.
Three generations
The Emory story runs through three generations of one family, and it predates almost everything else in the modern restomod world. The grandfather, Neil Emory, was a coachbuilder, a co-founder of a custom shop in California in the postwar years, working metal by hand in the era when that was simply how cars were modified. The father, Gary Emory, built a business around Porsche parts and developed a deep, working knowledge of the 356. The grandson, Rod Emory, took that inheritance and turned it into a defined philosophy and a recognized brand.
That continuity matters. The Emory approach to the 356 was not invented in a marketing meeting. It grew out of a family that had been cutting, welding, and reshaping these cars by hand for decades, across three generations of accumulated knowledge about how a 356 goes together and how it can be made better.
What an Outlaw is
The Emory Outlaw is a 356 reimagined rather than restored. A purist restoration returns a 356 to exactly how it left the factory. An Outlaw does the opposite. It takes the 356 as a starting point and improves it, with more power, modernized brakes and suspension, subtle body modifications, and detailing that the factory never offered. The name itself is the point. An Outlaw breaks the rules of correctness in service of building a better-driving, more personal car.
The body work is where the Emory craft shows most clearly. Panels are reshaped by hand, roof lines chopped, details smoothed and altered, all using the metalworking skills passed down through the family. The result is a 356 that looks almost stock until you know what you are looking at, and then reveals a hundred small deliberate changes.
Why it started a movement
The Emory family demonstrated, long before it was fashionable, that a vintage Porsche could be treated as raw material for something better rather than as a relic to be preserved exactly. That idea is now everywhere. Singer does it with the 964. Gunther Werks does it with the 993. Dozens of builders now reimagine air-cooled cars to a high standard. But the Emory family was doing the core thing, hand-reshaping vintage Porsches into improved personal cars, for decades before any of them.
The 356 was the canvas because it was the family's car, the one Neil Emory worked in period and the one Gary Emory knew down to the last fastener. The Outlaw philosophy could have been applied to anything. It became a movement because three generations of one family had spent a lifetime learning how to do it properly first.