Aftermarket Moto DesignDid you notice? Well, did you? On the front cover of the latest AMD edition? Look closer. Yes, well done - what's with all this Aftermarket Moto Design stuff you may ask? A future with more sales opportunities for you, that's all!
The evolution of the custom market, and of AMD along with it, has been an interesting one. The short version…
We first started to see a broadening away from chopper monoculture in Europe in the 1990s, when customizing evolved from its historic dual foundations of West Coast lowrider imitation and restoration to original and concourse condition. Later in the 1990s, the emergence of the 'Euro Style', as it was known, was born from increasing influence from the so-called 'Metric market' in Europe, and, in particular, of Streetfighter styling migrating from Japanese motorcycle platforms to air-cooled V-twins.
Single-sided swingarms and the 'Fat Rear End Boom' followed. With 'Euro Style' informing the agenda in the domestic U.S. market for the years either side of the Millennium, we saw a morphing of orthodoxy accompanied by a gradual reduction in the influence of 'traditional' custom tribal loyalties as the Boomers started to age out.
Back in the day I wrote long and often about how the chopper and catalog bike market of the noughties was sowing the seeds of its own destruction, just as assuredly as prog rock was killed off by punk. The rush to volume, that at its peak was soaking up in the region of 60,000 aftermarket V-twins, was the 'Hair Metal' of the evolution of the custom market – popular, but ultimately unsatisfying.
OEMs are now the Pilot Fish
The 'Ying' to that 'Yang' was the rush to price-point as the early effects of the mortgage crisis started to make Bobbers hot, and from that point, the rest is history. Long before the concept of 'Alt Moto' was coined, I was referring to the 'New Wave' as a desire, increasingly for "motorcycles of character", for simplicity and for affordability, without compromising individuality, authenticity and, you know, handling and performance.
Emerging 'New Gen' riders didn't want, and do not want, to accept that affordability means a loss of authenticity - and we have now, gloriously, seen the motorcycle industry beginning to respond to "what the customer wants" for some five years now. With the new Royal Enfield 650s representing the thin end of what, within a decade, may well be a very thick wedge of convincing, affordable platforms that perform and handle well, and offer a price-point that can be a start-point, will now capitalize on the fertile ground prepared by R nineTs and Scramblers.
The first AMD World Championship in California in 2004 showcased the emergence, indeed the explosion onto the market, of the 'retro vibe'. By 2009, just as the mortgage crises morphed into the global financial crisis, we were seeing the hegemony of an air-cooled V-twin defined market - choppers and otherwise - give way to diversification and demand for a return to a simpler form of craftsmanship and innovation. In 2009 a 91" Shovel/Evo hybrid by Satya Kraus was a massive pointer to what was to come.
Thereafter, the number of what one would term 'conventional' or 'mainstream' layout Harley V-twin platforms appearing at the 'AMD' has dimished. Ditto aftermarket V-twins.
Since Thunderbike's Ironhard Sportster won the AMD in 2012, the AMD World Championship-winning bike platforms have been a 1971 Moto Guzzi (Ireland), a 1650 cc BMW engine (Belgium), a heavily modified and remachined 1973 Ironhead Sportster (Japan) and last year's Yamaha SR 400 from Russia.
In the meantime, the demand for 'motorcycles of character' that the 'AMD' has showcased has birthed the so-called 'Alt Moto Scene' of cafe racers, bobbers and trackers - just one of the now many niche styles that live happily side-by-side to constitute a concept of motorcycle customizing that now genuinely has no boundaries, one that is now a genuinely 'Freestyle' world in which 'all is good'.
The influence of the entry into the custom market of several of the major OEM manufacturers has done much to spin that evolution, though they would not be channelling resources if that wasn't where a large proportion of their historic customer base had migrated.
There was a time when the aftermarket was viewed as the Pilot Fish of the motorcycle industry, feasting on the morsels the voracious OEMs left in their wake - now that has been completely reversed.
As I have said many, many times, the child has eaten the parent, and what was once niche is now mainstream, and it is aftermarket custom motorcycle design and engineering that is setting the pace and shaping the future of the mainstream market.
I have always believed that good publishers allow their audience to write their agenda and follow taste and demand. In the case of a 'B2B' trade journal such as AMD, we make money by helping our readers to make money. Our job is to serve you up customers - customers who are themselves making their living out of selling custom parts and accessories, improving the performance and handling of their customers' bikes and customizing and building bikes for them.
In the past five years our in-house 'skunk works' has been hard at work preparing the ground for being able to add new dimensions to the business opportunities we represent for the custom market.
Having arrived at a point where the potency of the AMD brand and its viability in additional sectors of the custom world is proven, the arrival of Royal Enfield's new 650 twins in dealerships in Europe and North America, along with the arrival of the press release about S&S Cycle's new range of 'Proven Performance' parts for it, has been the catalyst for pulling the trigger on a modest but forward facing change that has been decades in the making.