PH2 Meets Norton's Stuart Garner
"We have bet everything on the V4 succeeding..." Norton's boss tells PH2
When did you buy Norton and what did you actually get?
"I bought Norton in October 2008. There are about 200 Norton trademarks held globally and I got the name Norton, the models - Commando, Manx and Atlas - and also luggage, clothing, etc. I have a full collection of trademarks and the opportunity to fully own the brand, which is so often not the case with a heritage brand. I was lucky, the previous American owner Ollie Curme had consolidated the ownership very well."
"Seven figures, it was in the millions."
What are the difficulties in reviving a British brand?
"The supply chain as there simply isn't one. If you want to bring a British brand back hand built in Britain like our dads remember, and not abroad like some others, then you will struggle as we did. You need everything - wheels, wiring looms, lights, exhausts - small but key parts of the supply chain are missing and we had to find suppliers and work with them to ensure the quality. On day one that was a bitch of a problem and took us two or three years to sort out and it is still a bit of a problem nowadays. If you want to make a British gearbox, who is buying it? There is no demand and therefore no supply."
So is it key to have British components on a Norton?
"It's a personal push to have everything British. But brakes and suspension and a few other bits and bobs we can't have at the moment. In the future hopefully we will."
"Yes, we delivered them to the market too early and we have learnt lessons. In the last two or three years we have refined the product. We send bikes all over the world and we didn't develop the bikes for different altitudes, temperatures and the rest when it came to their calibration - we were naive and we learnt the hard way. We made some almighty cock-ups, but we have stood there and looked after the customer base and put our mistakes right. But what we got wrong in delivering the bikes too early, we learnt the hard way by getting our arses kicked and the V4 will have an extra six months of development to ensure it is absolutely match fit. It won't be released until it is ready and will have a two-year unlimited mileage warranty."
Why move to sports bikes when the retro market is massive and the sports bike market isn't that strong?
"That is true for mainstream mass-market manufacturers, but Norton isn't one of them and won't be. We will make 200-500 sports bikes a year and mainstream rules don't apply and exclusive machines are therefore commercially viable. The volume and price points we will sell our sports bikes for justify the investment."
"Close to £10m, easily £7m, probably eight to 10. Honestly, that's why I'm skint. We had a government grant of £4.29m and we found the rest ourselves. And that's why the V4 is such a big deal, we have bet the ranch on it! Genuinely. We were properly scared on Monday before we showed it to potential customers, but the reaction has told us we will be OK. All it needed was someone to come up and say 'you have screwed up here...' and it would have been curtains."
Do you have enough money to build them?
"Yes. There is a reason why all the heritage old brands have gone, with the exception of Triumph, and you don't see many new ones coming to market - because it is bloody tough. On day one you are faced with a multi-million pound engineering cost just to get a bike to a point where it can be sold. And then there is no guarantee of a sale or profit and if you have warranty issue or the market changes then you are in trouble. If you don't sell enough to cover the costs of the investment you are out of business. You try getting a financial backer to invest in that kind of plan with that risk. We now have positive cash flow and once we met this point we had the brand back to a survival situation and the second model can put meat on the bones that the first can't. The first model is tough, the second hard but you can see the light at the end of the tunnel."
"I think so, it is now just bloody hard work, but we are financially secure and a lot of the risk has gone."
You are a businessman, are you looking to off-load Norton for a profit now?
"I'll never sell Norton, I have invested too much of my life and Skinner's life into it. If I sold the business and called Simon Skinner, our Head of Design, to tell him the news he would probably come around and burn my house down! If I had a big bag of money, what would I do tomorrow? There is nothing better than building bikes."
What about film work, didn't we see you in James Bond?
"Ha, yes, but that's another story..."
Hope they do well as a relaunched brand!
Not sure what they big push is for completely British componentry...
Surely no one minds Sachs/Ohlins/Brembos/K Tech bits?!
). Rest of the show was a bit blah unfortunately: new Blade and Gixxer? Mwah. RSV RF & S1000RR? The same (where was the carbon RR from Intermot??) No MV's to drool over and even the ZX10RR and R1's were forgettable (though the new R6 was nice). A pity really, but the Superleggera and the Nortons saved the day, but I'll be keeping my own Pani for another while yet! Gassing Station | Biker Banter | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff