As always with this column, my mission is to make motorcycle dealers richer. However, with the recent decline in scooter sales that gave us all buoyancy for a couple of years, and the onset of dark winter nights when showroom activity nosedives, even I find it hard to come up with retail balm. Nevertheless, thanks to the enthusiasms of my new personal assistant and masseuse, Sonja Bedstead, whose unusual and perhaps surgically enhanced buoyancy promises the perfect antidote to dark winter nights, I have been inspired to make certain propositions that I know you, if not she, will warm to. My thinking is basically this: In the past two decades the entire nature of aftermarket retailing has changed, and whilst canny bike traders have not been slow to jump on any bandwagon that rolls along, it's about time we started anticipating where the new ones will appear from. Back in the '70s it was easy. Bikers needed helmets, clothing and maybe the odd top-box, but once you'd flogged the bike the big money came from consumables, replacements for shagged-out running gear, and performance bolt-ons. Indeed, there were whole mini-industries, best exemplified by the likes of Read-Titan and Paul Dunstall, who would tart-up your UJM or screaming stroker with all manner of go-faster gear and silly looking bodywork. But none of this would now be appropriate because recent generations of new machinery go as fast as stink and look better than any Herbert with a biro and an empty fag packet could dream up, anyway.
Moreover, and despite what grumbling couriers will tell you, the durability of OEM components is now such that replacement intervals are further and further apart. |
The trade's response to this idiocy has been to dream up gizmos that bikers never thought they needed before, persuade feckless magazine hacks that they do, then flog the arse out of 'em. (The products, not the journos... quot;although sometimes that would work," observed the waspish Sonja). Take fuel-tank crotch protectors, leathers with built-in hunchbacks and knee-sliders as three of the more sensible retail enticements. We managed without them for decades, but now they are almost de rigeur for the discerning motorbicyclist. But of course, things got sillier still with clip-on coloured headlamp covers, handlebar grips with garish logos moulded into them, and let's not forget stick-on helmet ears (or, as I saw on the streets of Roma last month, a leopard-print fake fur helmet cover... complete with ears, naturally). Admittedly I was mildly astonished to read in last month's Trader that the company responsible for these fluffy appendages claim to've sold 250,000 of the things (which could of course mean 125,000 pairs), and are now marketing tyre-valve covers which light up in various sprauncey hues as the wheels revolve. Indeed I've already seen some of these major technological advances on sale locally, albeit at MotorWorld. So given that there is no limit to the gullibility of the motorcycling public, or their restless quest for inane gimmickry, let me suggest a few more products that some smart manufacturers should immediately start pouring their massive R & D budgets into (well, twenty quid, at least), so that we might ensure our future prosperity.
We've already seen prototype coloured rubberwear from some tyre makers (and indeed Durex), so can it be beyond the wit of boffins to produce see-through boots? Lots of impressionable chumps would certainly pay big-time to be seen "riding on air", as the marketing balderdash would doubtless have it.
Because of its neutral stance, the sack of potatoes was long regarded as the ideal pillion passenger (much better than some silly girlie leaning the wrong way), and so for lonely bachelor bikers we have a plastic sack in the shape of a gorgeous blonde which you fill up at your greengrocers. |
Punters can dress Ms. Potato in snazzy attire to suit their mood... although fishnet stockings and a red satin basque in mid-December might give the game away. (N.B. Your inflatable sex doll is NOT a cheap alternative to spudgirl: trust me, you just can't get ten kilos of King Edwards through any of those orifices). Face it, sexism is rampant amongst the biking fraternity and there is a common association made between the size of your wedding tackle and the size of your exhaust. In order to get your tills a'ringing, the Big Bulge is a fake muffler which slips over your existing silencer adding inches to both girth and length. You can hear those girlie squeals (of derision?) as they pull up to the lights. Made in space-age, carbon-fibre effect drainpipe that only marginally affects handling. Since he's spent all that money buying a machine only 60% of whose performance he can use, you can boost his ego by selling him a set of Lime Lights. Taking their cue from airliner technology, these are small but powerful spotlamps fitted onto the lower flanks of the fairing which illuminate the entire bike and its god- like pilot. For an extra £300, you can flog him a Computerised Laser Anti-Theft module (i.e. connector box), which switches on the lights and illuminates any prat who tries to nick the bike. If you've persuaded him to buy a set of leathers customised to match the garish livery of his repli-racer, for a mere fifty quid you can flog him a form hugging oversuit in transparent latex. (Step forward again, the London Rubber Company). This way, he can still look like a multi-coloured prat, sorry, adonis, even when he gets caught short in a cloudburst. (My new personal assistant says such suits might also have applications in the boudoir... such a mysterious woman that Sonja). And if your customers are too mean to buy any of the above, there's always the £19.99 fake fur helmet cover... possibly in the shape of a chimpanzee's head. |