Alan Dowds talks to Paul Beamish, boss at Krazy Horse, and a man who doesn’t do ‘corporate’
Managing a bike business into its fourth decade is difficult at the best of times. When your showroom is a little bit different, conventional wisdom suggests it could be a lot harder than just “difficult”!
But that’s not the case for the South East’s Krazy Horse, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
The rock’n’roll nature of the business has turned out to be its strength, helping it stay both relevant and exciting in the face of a mainstream bike trade that has become ever more corporate.
Quizzing the owner of Krazy Horse, Paul Beamish, at the Devitt MCN London bike show, where he had a stand packed with novelty, I kicked him off with a bit of history.
“We started in a shed, in my mate’s garden, at a place called Little Whelnetham just outside Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. Me and a mate were riding around on old Harleys and at the time there weren’t many Harley dealers around. We were off to a European Harley rally, but his clutch cable went, and we couldn’t get one anywhere. I had a friend who worked for Zodiac, a Dutch distributor of aftermarket Harley parts, I had a chat with him, and he got us the bits so we could do the rally. I later asked the Dutch guys if it would make sense if we opened a weekly Saturday morning store. There were a lot of people locally with Harleys because of all the American air bases in East Anglia, but there was no dealership. We started off selling service parts, gaskets, and oil filters from my mate’s shed and it grew from there.”
At the time, Beamish was a 29-year-old engineer working in the packaging industry, and his firm, Ravenwood Packaging, is now a major player in the global food distribution business. If you look in your fridge, a few items will, apparently, have come via a Ravenwood machine. For Beamish the bike business was a bit of a sideline at first. However, changes in the industry and the popularity of custom choppers in the late 1990s helped Krazy Horse move up a level.
“In the late 1990s, TV programmes like Orange County Choppers and West Coast Choppers appeared on the Discovery channel and we became very busy building custom bikes, so much so it meant moving into a retail showroom and workshop in the centre of Bury St. Edmunds. When Motorcycle Single Vehicle Approval was legislated in the UK it was a step-change for us. We could still build and register custom bikes in the UK, but a lot of European countries couldn’t. For example, you could not build a custom bike from scratch and register it in France.
“Then I got in touch with Zero Engineering in Japan, and we started to distribute their small-volume type-approved bikes and to set up dealers across Europe, building a distribution business.”
European expansion brought many contacts across the continent, and Krazy Horse became known as the people to go to for low-volume, premium bike distribution. Beamish took on two brands from Italy – Zaeta lightweight off-roaders and Patton, best known for its Isle of Man TT race bikes, as well as the Absolute Choppers range from Sweden.
“All this grew our business in a slightly different way, and we were running out of space,” said Beamish. “So I bought a bigger unit in Bury St. Edmunds. The world’s changing, people want something different to ride, and they want a destination, we decided we’d build a destination dealership. It took ages to get planning permission, but we put a café in and completed everything in 2012. And that took us on to another level.”
Today, Krazy Horse has four dealerships: the original Bury St. Edmunds store, plus locations in Chipping Norton, Kensington in central London, and Welling, South East London. That growth has been driven by taking on more franchises, including Indian Motorcycles at its launch in 2012, when it rose out of the ashes of the Victory brand.
Krazy Horse owner Paul Beamish in a Microlino“After opening in Bury in 2012, we were at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, next to Victory. Lee Frankish [Indian’s UK launch manager] was there, and he kept trying to get us interested saying; ‘there’s something coming you need to know about!’ I wasn’t really interested in Victory, but I was in Indian. So we became one of the first Indian dealers. The Welling site was already an Indian dealer (Aye Gee Motorcycles) who had decided to get out of the business. Lee asked, do you want to get involved? So we bought the showroom in 2015, then we took on Chipping Norton just before Covid, and Kensington in 2021.”
The Kensington High Street store is a local landmark – it used to be the London HQ for the luxury Bristol car brand. How did it become part of Krazy Horse? “We were looking for a London MV Agusta dealership when we saw it. Bristol Cars had just gone bust, and so we had a chat with the Hilton hotel which owns the building. We thought it would be a great place for MV: they decided not to go with it, but Indian did. Initially we were exclusively Indian, but we’re now also doing other brands there. Selling motorcycles in London is tough at the moment.
“For this reason, we’ve increased our brands: Indian, Norton, MV Agusta and Fantic. Back in 2012, when we opened the new Bury site, we started doing Morgan three-wheelers. That grew so quickly we had to open on the other side of the road, and now we also do Caterham and Dodge/Ram. Plus, of course, the new Microlino electric bubble car range.”
It’s an eclectic mix of brands, and perfectly in tune with the firm’s ethos. Passion is the watchword, rather than the corporate approach that’s taken over in the big brand motorcycle and car world.
“It’s a social business,” said Beamish. “We’re all motorcyclists first, and manufacturers don’t necessarily understand that. And because manufacturers are so demanding in the way they treat their dealers; they don’t listen to them. They just force them down what they think is the right route. And that isn’t always the case. They force dealers to spend so much money on showrooms to get their dealer standards to where they want, but the reality is, do motorcyclists want that? Not really. What they want is a good café and someone that won’t worry if they turn up wet or covered in crap. They also want someone to talk to about their passion, not a car salesman who’s been transferred from cars to the bike side and probably doesn’t even have a bike license. But he can sell you gap insurance…
“Ultimately, you’ll get success if dealers and manufacturers are on the same trajectory and want the same things. The motorcycle industry needs to be driven by passion because that’s what everyone is here is for.”
www.krazyhorse.co.uk