How We Choose the Best Motorcycle Gear | Motolegends

In some ways this story has been framed as a response to what I imagine was a somewhat glib remark on social media about Motolegends always thinking it offers the best products. The correspondent's point, I think, was that ours was a position born out of conceit or arrogance. Probably both!

Obviously, I am not in a position to give an objective response to the gentleman's allegation, but his comments did give me food for thought. And over the weeks following his post I spent some time thinking about whether he had a point; whether hubris did occasionally cloud our judgements and assessments, or whether we do in fact get to market a good proportion of the best products the motorcycle apparel market has to offer.

Anyway, let's get in to it.

A positive starting point

When Sara and I decided to get into the selling of motorcycle clothing it wasn't our only business; and it still isn't.

We didn't see this venture as a path to fame and fortune. We were keen motorcyclists; and quite simply we were disappointed with the quality of most of the motorcycle clothing shops we came across. We knew there was nice gear out there, but most of the places we visited didn't seem to stock it. We felt we could do better.

For us setting up Motolegends was a bit of a vanity project. It was not about making money, although obviously we knew that, ultimately, it would have to wash its face. Which one day we still hope it will do!

Sara, my co-director, runs the operational side of the business, which is probably why we have an unsullied five-star rating on Trustpilot. Me, I am more about product.

The problem is that I simply like stuff. To steal a bit of jargon from Revzilla in the US, I'm a bit of a 'gear geek'. I probably like stuff more than I should. It's not something that I'm necessarily proud of. And although I have pockets more suited to the buying of beer, I nonetheless have developed a palette for champagne.

As a result I am naturally drawn to the best of things. The best shoes. The best watches. The best coffee machines. The best bicycles. Most recently, and somewhat bizarrely, the best camping gear, which is strange because I've never actually been camping!

And so it is with motorcycle gear. I have never been interested in filling the shelves at Motolegends with the kind of stuff you can find everywhere. I full well realised, and still do, that this means that we will only ever attract a niche audience, although I do slightly tend to the view that everybody has aspirations; and I don't believe that we sell anything that the 'Man on the Clapham Omnibus' couldn't afford if he really wanted it.

In my defence, your honour, this would be my opening address.

What the market has to offer

In truth, when we do occasionally claim to offer a product that is better than the rest, that bar is not set particularly high.

And that's because there are actually not a lot motorcycle clothing brands out there whose ambition it is to produce best-in-class gear. There are some, but they are few and far between. And that makes the job of identifying the best stuff easier in a way because the gene pool of truly high-end products is quite small.

There is an inescapable truth here. The selling of motorcycle clothing in the UK is not what our American cousins would call an 'upscale' business.

Even now we sometimes find it difficult to understand the reasons for this, and that’s because for many riders the motorcycle is not about the cheapest way to get about or to ride into work. The bike is often a bit of a toy, a weekend indulgence; the very definition of a discretionary purchase. And bikes are not inexpensive; some might even consider them to be luxury goods. The twenty grand motorcycle, after all, is not an uncommon sight on today’s roads.

Given the amount of money people are prepared spend on making their already expensive bikes even more expensive it still surprises us that in so many of our meetings with manufacturers and distributors, there seems to be an almost obsessive focus on pricing. Even brands that you wouldn't expect it of often seem keen to join that headlong race to the bottom.

The problem, as we see it, is that if a manufacturer is too driven by price it makes it very unlikely that they will consistently be able to come up with outstanding products. Sometimes something that is extraordinary might slip through the net of one of these companies. But if a brand becomes fixated on cost, the pursuit of excellence kind of goes out of the window.

The reality is that there are actually very few brands that are driven by the need to make things better for the sake of making them better.

Of course, just about every brand manages to convince itself that it offers excellent value for money; that its products are better than those of its competitors for a given price point. But very few, in our experience, take the view that quality is their paramount consideration. Hitting a price point usually seems more important than attaining a quality standard. There are some, however; and for these brands the price is not the driver but the outcome. The price is simply what the end user has to be pay once the product has been manufactured and a fair margin extracted.

We're talking here about brands like Arai, Shoei, Daytona boots, Rukka, Aerostich in the US perhaps, Warm&Safe, maybe Kushitani in Japan, the original BKS in Devon, Stadler in Germany, Five gloves, Klim, Rokker and Belstaff. Brands like these are not infrequently overseen by a single person, a family or a small group of highly focussed individuals. When we get into discussions with these companies, price is very rarely the key consideration.

Conversations might revolve around technical advances, new materials and fabrics, improvements in manufacturing techniques or ways that design innovations have led to increased functionality. There may well be talk of ways to bring products to the attention of a wider audience; but never about lowering the price of the product in order to increase the appeal of the product to that audience.

As we have said, such brands are few and far between. But what most of them have in common is that they often specialise in a specific product category; or at least a very narrow range of products.

Below these sit a mass of mid-market brands making reasonably-priced, but often very good quality, products. These companies might still be quite technical; some might even have a Gore-Tex licence. Occasionally, they will come up with a product that is truly exceptional, but most of these brands are generalists; and in trying to be all things to all people only rarely do they really hit the very highest notes.

In this group we would find clothing brands such as Dainese, Alpinestars, Furygan perhaps, Spidi, Halvarssons, Held, Macna, Richa, Revitt, Segura and so on.

Below this sit what one might term the entry-level or budget brands; brands where price will usually be a key component of the offering. We’re talking about names such as Oxford Products, RST, Weise, Merlin, Frank Thomas, Bering, Spada and so on. These brands will often offer terrific value for money; but despite their rhetoric quality per se is not what they are about.

And so my point is that if a retailer is minded to work with the very best products the market has to offer, those products are not necessarily that hard to identify. In a sea of mediocrity those islands of excellence kind of stand out.

In truth, nearly all the mid-market brands we work with will produce the occasional excellent product. But you have to sift through their collections to find them. For us, right now, there’s the Tech Air 5 Plasma airbag from Alpinestars, the Carvemaster jacket from Dainese, the Vinvallen suit from Halvarssons, the Carese 3 from Held, the Vintage jacket from Spidi, the Adventure boot from Xpd, the Stripper pants from Richa, the ANC helmet from Schuberth, the Vertigo boot from Stylmartin. And so on.

But rarely will such products be the cheapest items produced by these brands. And for many retailers that is the crux of the dilemma. If you want to offer the best products out there they are inevitably going to be more expensive. That will limit their appeal. And with shelf space always at a premium, that doesn’t necessarily make for good business. Which is why lots of shops won't stock them.

Here at Motolegends we have always accepted that you cannot have your cake and eat it. We know that the price to be paid for offering better quality, more expensive products is going to be less people coming through the door. That’s a cost that we are happy to accept, in the hope that there are still enough people looking for these kinds of products to pay the wages bill at the end of the month.

But that’s not a price that most retailers are prepared to pay. For most retailers the only thing that really matters is the ringing of the till.

Our parting shot

The gentleman who precipitated this particular diatribe was clearly irritated by my/our repeated claims to have found the best gear on the market. And I can see that me banging on about why yet another of our products is outstanding could get on somebody’s nerves.

But whilst we cannot claim to have a monopoly on sourcing the best products, I do believe the search for excellence is more important to us than it is to most retailers, who are, probably quite rightly, more focussed on the health of their bank balance than they are on the quality of the products they offer.

It’s funny; when a visiting rep. from one of the distributors tells us that one of the products he represents is a ‘best seller’, it’s nearly always an immediate turn off for us. We're just not interested. Chasing volume is not what we are about.

And when it comes to identifying the best stuff, I feel we have become pretty good at deconstructing gear. Over the years I reckon I have probably put in the necessary 10,000 hours. And so when we come across something new from a brand, it normally won’t take us long to work out if it’s something special.

And so, in conclusion, irritating as it might be to some, I do think that, more often than most retailers, we do get to play with more than our fair share of the very best products out there.

Of course; not all of our products are top of the line. We also have to fill the shelves with stuff that’s more mundane; more everyday; more affordable. And it has to be acknowledged that we don’t work with all the brands out there. But we do know them all. We know the gear they produce. And if we truly felt that a particular brand produced an item that was demonstrably superior, we’d go out of our way to work with that brand; even if that meant buying just the one product from them.

The bottom line here is that as a retailer we are, as we always have been, driven to find the best products the market has to offer. We can become childlishly excited when we come across something that we deem to be truly outstanding. That could be a helmet, a new boot, a jacket; or even a set of braces. But it’s my sense that not many other retailers share this undiluted enthusiasm for the end product.

None of this makes us cleverer than other retailers; in fact, in many ways quite the opposite is true.

We are almost certainly not as successful as a business as we could, or even should, be. But that’s not why we’re in this. What excites us is the gear; the products we sell. It’s why, for us, the highlight of the year is always the EICMA trade fair in Milan in November. There we get to feel, try on, talk about and learn about what we could be offering our customers in the coming year. Milan gives us a buzz like little else. And that’s not just down to the constant intake of espressos!

And if we think that something we’ve taken on is really, really good - the best even - then we’ll have no qualms about going out and giving people our opinion, because we really like to share these things.

And if that comes across as a little conceited or arrogant, then I’m sorry. That’s not our intention, but people’s perceptions are often their realities, so we may have to accept that that is what some people will think.