American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 168 July 2013 | Page 4

Price Point builds have interesting implications IX months ago I was able to report that the parts and accessory industry had done “okay” in 2012 – profits had been better than in 2011, largely down to continued good housekeeping, and sales had been generally up, albeit mostly by low single digits. Compared to where our market has been during the past five or six years, anything that suggested stability and sustainability had to be taken as a positive and something that could be built on. That general perception continued in the feedback I got at the V-Twin Expo this year. Very few (if any) of the exhibitors I spoke to reported a continued loss of sales in 2012, with most actually quite bullish about where they were at in cycle terms. Realism about sales was balanced by relief that the bottom of the market did indeed appear to have been traversed. Since then the Spring selling season appears to have gone reasonably well for most of the people I have been speaking to – although the crazy weather patterns that now appear to be the new default for the northern hemisphere have made month-on-month comparisons difficult. Some traditionally strong months have been weak this year, but it appears to have been a pattern of delayed rather than lost sales, with vendors in Europe and the United States mostly telling me that sales so far this year (to mid-June) are up on the same period of 2012. It has to be said that performance, bolt-on and servicing/tuning remain the bread and butter as the market continues to fall back on staples rather than heavy duty industrial grade customization. ndeed, that pattern has been massively self-evident in the trends seen at custom bike shows on both sides of the Atlantic in the past 24 months, and not least at the recent 10th annual AMD World Championship of Custom Bike Building at the Big Bike Europe expo a few weeks ago. The trend towards ‘garagebuilds’ had already been well set ever since ground-up chrome and paint fest builds peaked in 2005 and 2006. The widespread diversification of custom platforms has reflected the new reality of price-point change that custom bike builders are having to respond to. In Europe, the days when customer-ordered custom builds hovered around the Harley CVO price point and north from there have been replaced by price points between 15,000 € and 30,000 € with interesting implications. With concerns about the market’s demographics re-emerging (despite HarleyDavidson’s continuing success in building youth rider market share without radically refined metal), some solace can be derived from a new price point realism as it allows twenty and thirty-somethings to engage in a way that was either previously prohibitive or finance dependent. As we saw at Essen in May, one of the interesting side-effects of this trend is S widespread diversification of custom platforms I that while current generation custom builds are less blinged-out than was previously the case, ingenuity and craftsmanship is being stimulated by a Darwinian "survival of the affordable effect". Builders are having to be cleverer and smarter and develop less expensive but nonetheless motivating and inspiring ideas that allow shallower pockets to still aspire to individuality and great design and engineering. The umbilical cord that used to connect parts and accessory catalogs to custom bike show winners is therefore being stretched thin, but on the upside custom builders are providing a pathway for new entrants at a time when downturn logic would make that tough. n the long term this can only be good for parts and accessory designers and manufacturers. The value of late model and used motorcycle buyers to the aftermarket has always been based upon th is entry price point. Harley-Davidson’s success in ring-fencing bling-based aftermarket builds with the development of a CVO program that lives in the $30-40,000 range forced aftermarket custom bike builders to reach for chopped down, sparsely designed bobber entry points at around half the cost. The benefit of hindsight now shows us that that was always destined to fail once credit dried up, but what we are now seeing in the custom build market is a resetting of the rules in such a way that riders, still with some twenty to thirty years of increasing buying power and deepening engagement, will replace the lower median percentiles of the demographic bell curve that would otherwise be lost. That is not to say that five, ten or fifteen years from now we are going to see a re-emergence of the same bubble that burst so spectacularly on us six years ago, but it does point to there still being life in the desire of consumers to own motorcycles of character. High-mileage riding accessories, performance and tuning products, service and workshop revenues and bolt-on parts and accessories will be the beneficiaries in the long-term, but don’t expect cause and effect to look or be the same as it was in the pre-Lehman decade. I Robin Bradley Co-owner/Editor-in-Chief [email protected]