With the cancelling of the TV show 'American Chopper", the future of custom choppers is left without a major marketing aid to constantly remind us how much we love choppers. The only custom motorcycle themed show to last more than a season, one has to wonder if the cancellation will have a profound impact on the industry as a whole or is the internet enough to keep it going?
The boost the custom motorcycle business received from the television show created around a group of guys who built custom choppers rivaled the dot com craze in the late nineties as far as the swell of new companies entering the business. As with any artificially created demand, eventually consumers came back to reality and many of the newly created motorcycle shops were forced to close their doors.
Once an almost completely underground market, the interest that was generated in those who would normally not be interested in choppers also propelled small companies into huge success and created an internet niche that has remained as large as it was during the custom motorcycle craze. Since websites are much less expensive to maintain than brick and mortar businesses, the economic slump did little to affect the huge number of websites that were built around custom motorcycles.
The question now is whether or not the business of building choppers can survive through this recession with only magazine ads and internet buzz to keep it a float. I would suspect many small shops that are barely hanging on will close their doors before the end of the year. Some may simply turn back into one man operations that can no longer afford a crew of bike builders.
The good news for hands on builders is that each one only needs to produce 5 or 6 choppers a year to keep their heads above water. And the few customers looking for choppers in these tough times are also the sort to not search for bargains as much as getting the bike they really want. Most blue collar workers, the type that were stretching their budgets to get into their own custom bikes when times were good are certainly not going to risk their families financial future on a $30,000 toy.
So this really leaves only the well to do and hardcore bikers as potential buyers of custom bikes in general. I believe the average Joes will come back to buying choppers but not until this economic slump is truly over and Americans are no longer afraid to spend money again. But we have certainly seen the heyday of the custom chopper industry. There's just simply no way it will be what it was during the American Chopper craze.
Probably more than half of those that bought custom bikes just because of the show have already traded them in on more practical motorcycles, if they're even still riding. When times got tough many just couldn't justify keeping something in the garage for an occasional ride that was worth more than a lot of Americans make in a year.
While there is future for choppers, it isn't going to look anything like the recent past.
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