"Were you involved with Indian at all when it was at Gilroy from 1999 to 2003?
No, I purchased all of the intellectual property assets in July 2004 from the credit managers representing the owners of the company. They sold alI the assets to us, and, with the proceeds, repaid the creditors.
Did you acquire any of the Gilroy hardware?
Yes, we bought whatever tooling they had available and all of the engineering drawings, all their computers, as well as container loads of documents. Fundamentally, we bought all the intellectual property and trademarks. So I started with a clean slate.
Having now become the owner of such a historic marque, did you then have to educate yourself in the motorcycle industry?
I inherited a Lambretta scooter from my grandfather, and then I bought a 125 Vespa. Until four years ago, these were the only bikes I'd ever owned, and so I got a U.S. motorcycle license, read my history books, went to rallies, and learned how to ride a proper bike.
Dare I ask if you own a Harley-Davidson?
No. I don't, but I have several Indians!
How did you get from there to here, on the verge of relaunching Indian again?
I spent two years developing a business plan — two years addressing major strategic issues. This is a business where a lot of people have lost a lot of money, a business which is very technology intensive, and very capital intensive. So I wanted to do things very slowly and very carefully. After two years, I felt comfortable with the plan. And in July 2006, I bought a plant in North Carolina, in Kings Mountain, which is about 40 minutes west of Charlotte, en route to Spartanburg, South Carolina, the American home of BMW. It's a good state — very supportive of our plan to set up Indian there. At the same time, we set up another plant for Chris-Craft — a much bigger plant just 10 minutes from the Indian factory. There were lots of good reasons to be in the area — the state is the home of NASCAR, and the Southeast USA is the growing center for the motor industry. We were thrilled to have the plant there, so having bought it, it was then important to put a good team together to develop the company, and its products.
There aren't many places you can find motorcycle engineers around the world — it tends to be a very concentrated industry, unlike the boat business which is very fragmented and where the barriers are fairly low. With what it costs to develop a single motorcycle, I could probably develop about 50 boats from scratch — so it was essential that we got a really good head of engineering. My total obsession from the beginning has been that this would be a company based on engineering talent, on strong product, as it was clear from the previous Indian company that where they had gone wrong was in not focusing on solid engineering. We decided that the main people we were going to hire would be engineers, and that̓s what we've done, with a minimum of back-office staff.
A lot of people have wondered what we were doing, because we haven't spoken at all to the press until now, with you — but we felt we didn't want to say anything until we had the right product, an opposed to lots of hype. This is a private-equity venture, and we're a small team — there's myself and another outside minority investor and the managers involved. What really matters is the product. Does the product do justice to the brand? Does the product meet the promise of the brand? This is the issue, not the PR hype. What matters is, is it a beautiful bike, a performing bike and are we supporting the customer with good after-sales service? That's what counts.
Who have you hired to achieve that?
We have Stephen Heese, who is my minority partner in the USA. He̓s been my business partner and friend for many years, and is the president of my company and also the president of Chris-Craft. Our general manager is a man called Chris Bernauer, who was with Harley-Davidson for 11 years, and was the platform director for the Sportster. As vice president of engineering, we also have Nick Glaja, who's Romanian, and was the principal powertrain engineer for Harley and, before that, the vice president of engineering for Victory, so he has tremendous experience and is highly talented. We now have 35 employees, and about 25 of those are engineers.
How were your new Indian models developed? Did you do it all in-house, or go elsewhere?
We studied all the revival projects: What John Bloor has done at Triumph; what Polaris did with Victory; we studied Excelsior-Henderson, MV Agusta, MZ, and of course the Harvard Business school studies on Ducati; and the studies on the decline of the U.S. and UK motorcycle industries. One of the benefits of total ignorance is you assume you have to educate yourself from scratch. Initially, we had three choices. One was to go and buy someone else's engine — but we wanted to develop a serious company, which means you must have your own powerplant. So we decided from that, we had to have our own engine - but do we start from scratch with a clean sheet, or do we take what the Gilroy Indian already had, and put it right? I decided to take what Indian already had — between 1999 and 2003, they sold 12,000 bikes, of which 4000 were Scouts using a proprietary S&S engine, and 8000 were Chiefs of which 4000 employed an S&S engine, and then 4000 used their own Powerplus 100 motor, which they introduced in 2002. One of the biggest bets you have to make in powersports product is the look — so we stayed true to the design, which I think they got right. The Powerplus 100 engine was a success aesthetically - it was a classic V-twin air-cooled engine, which isn't rocket science, but it needed to work properly, so we've spent the last I8 months completely redoing all the internals, and although the engine looks similar to before, it's 90-percent a brand-new engine."
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Topic: Indian Motorcycle Grand Opening (Read 7463 times)