“It Was Rammed”
No exaggeration, the aisles of the 240,000 sq ft Hall 10, which staged INTERMOT Customized and the AMD World Championship of Custom Bike Building, were crammed with people from around 9:30 am through to within an hour or so of the 6:00 pm close on each of the first four of the five public attendance days; even the generally slower Sunday was noticeably busier than in prior years.
The combined Press and Dealer day was also more crowded than we’d seen before and estimates put the INTERMOT Customized attendance at around 150,000 with INTERMOT as a whole pulling around the same attendance as 2016 - some 220,000 people. This confirms INTERMOT Customized and the ‘AMD’ as a major draw for the whole of the motorcycle industry, as the best attended indoor international custom industry expo there has ever been, anywhere, and as the headquarters event for the international custom market in the 21st century - a Parallel Universe of business opportunity.
Zodiac International: The oldest of the specialty V-twin distributors in Europe, and based in the Netherlands with sales offices and agents in all of Europe’s main markets, Zodiac has always been well known for its relationship with its dealers, multi-lingual catalogs and newsletters and focus on the leading U.S. brands, backed up by respected own brand product lines; www.zodiac.nl
Harley-Davidson: Like BMW and other OEMs, Harley had two booths at INTERMOT, with its INTERMOT Customized Hall 10 custom Dark Custom showcase alongside the AMD World Championship bikes; www.harley-davidson.de
AGM Saddlebags: Owned by PB Germany, the AGM brand is one of Europe’s leading leather saddlebag makers. Founded nearly 30 years ago, it sells its massive range of custom bike oriented designs worldwide to dealers and distributors; www.agm-bikers.com
URAL: From Russia with love - love for the unique heritage and authenticity that an immensely storied heritage that this most idiosyncratic of brands carries with it into the 21st century. Intrinsically linked to the politics of the Eastern Front during WWII, and forever associated with sidecars, the brand continues to sell popular, straightforward, new generation two-wheel drive workhorses that eat the toughest of terrain and satisfy a yearning for simpler times and robust, repairable machines that are all about fun - “Who will you ride with?”; www.ural.com
Nolan Group: INTERMOT Customized gave the legendary Italian motorcycle helmet manufacturer the chance to show that there is more to the Nolan brand than advanced full-face street and race helmets, but with the company’s half shells, modular/flip-up designs and advanced rider communications technology, cruiser riders can benefit from decades of R&D investment too; www.nolan.it
Detlev Louis: For the first time this year, the AMD World Championship of Custom Bike Building featured a ‘Public Choice’ prize for Hall 10 visitors, and our partner for the vote was the leading Hamburg, Germany headquartered motorcycle parts, accessory and gear retailer Detlev Louis. Tracing its roots back more than 80 years, and these days under the ownership of Warren Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska based Berkshire Hathaway, Louis has over 80 retail stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and a thriving online mail order business, having been one of the originators of the mail order catalog concept in the motorcycle industry in Europe in the 1960s; www.louis.de
