Guy Trebay of the NY Times wrote in an article today:
“Despite the wholesale plundering of biker culture by the design world, there is plenty of gold left to mine from this $9.7-billion industry. The average age of motorcyclists continues to increase, to 41 today, from 32 in 1990, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Yet, paradoxically, biker style looks fresher than ever. This, at least, was the impression one took away from the 27th Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show, which blew into Manhattan at the Javits Center last week.”
If you don’t know already my new company (RevZilla.com) is focused on the “lifestyle” of the motorcyclist and lesser so on the parts they need to keep their rides running.
The article is great and basically speaks to and validates most things that we had speculated about in varying degrees up until this point. Its nice to see other like minded, non-hell’s-angels taking notice of the readily apparent collision between utility inspired biker wares with high-end aspirational products and lifestyle apparel.
See the Article: Stealing From a Biker Gang
A great example is the striking similarities between the Xelement Biker Boots pictured above and Mark Nason Distortions pictured below. If I didn’t tell you, could you tell that the Xelements are $75 and the Nason’s cost $450?
Somewhere in my due diligence I picked up this snippet: Other than golf & motorcycles, its difficult to name another major lifestyle or hobby that people partake in from the time they are 5 years old until they die.
…and no World of Warcraft doesn’t count.
Its tough to do, and considering I find golf to be about as exciting as Tolstoy – Motorcycles have been a front runner in my mind for launching a new lifestyle based business for a while. I really don’t think I could write product descriptions about putters all day even if I had to.
Each day my partners and I evaluate and reevaluate our offering, competitive advantage, positioning and strategy based all available information.
Lately its been going extremely well, with traffic, conversion rate and revenues climbing steadily week by week. A few times it’s felt like I am in the middle of the Perfect Storm, with things just falling into place.
Now if I can get Mark Nason to let me carry his boots and Tommy Lee to write a testimonial we’d be all set.
Anthony Bucci