New-fashioned showtime

The Bike Shed show in London was bigger and better this year – and it’s also grown its appeal. Alan Dowds spoke to the organiser, Dutch van Someren, about what’s changed and what’s coming up for the future

Putting on a consumer motorcycle show used to be quite simple. Hire a massive industrial hangar, fill it with new bikes, adorn it with conventionally attractive human beings of suitable gender, sell space to hawkers of discontinued tank bags and cheap paddock stands, then season with a light dusting of high-price moderate-quality burger vans. Avoid the area until it’s all finished, then bank the proceeds. Repeat in 12 months.

We’re joking of course. But it’s fair to say that the nature of bike shows has subtly changed of late, with a focus on events, experiences and enjoyment rather than simply piling up bikes, bargains and babes in one place. Nowadays, shows like the NEC’s Motorcycle Live and the ExCeL show in London are working harder to earn their keep, and new shows like the Adventure Bike Festival are transforming the show experience with outdoor adventure riding tracks, guest speakers, and ‘carefully curated’ content.

And it’s probably fair to say that the Bike Shed Show in London kicked much of this off. The entire Bike Shed organisation wasn’t actually launched with the plush restaurant/ bar in Shoreditch which is the heart of the operation now – but with a small-scale show ten years ago on 18 May 2013 in the Shoreditch Studio off Bateman’s Row. And it was the ‘old school’ NEC show which was the catalyst for this new approach. As Bike Shed founder Anthony ‘Dutch’ van Someren told me back in 2017 when I interviewed him, he’d been to the NEC in 2012 and was chatting with his mates about how they would do it. “We wanted really good food, a good bar, good coffee that’s drinkable, photography and art on the walls, clean toilets so your girlfriend doesn’t want to leave after five minutes… We wanted a beautiful venue, so the venue is as beautiful as the bikes. And every bike would be curated and be there for a reason.” machines, desert racers, MotoGP bikes and turbocharged drag racers as well as the ‘usual’ Bike Shed fare of older custom bikes, some a little ‘wacky’. There are also more corporate exhibitors, with brands like Alpinestars, Yamaha, BMW and Michelin that some might not immediately associate with the conventional notion of a ‘Bike Shed’ partner.

That first tiny show was a hit, and the restaurant would open a couple of years later, giving the Bike Shed a solid permanent base for its operations.

I caught up with van Someren a week after the show, and he confirmed that view. “Yes, absolutely. I think our ‘cultural footprint’ is growing, as we embrace more adventure bikes, more sports bike style stuff. We had our Bike Shed Talks panel, talking about the future of motorcycling, so we’re definitely trying to grow into more of a motorcycle culture. We spent a decade moving away from café racers into general culture.

“Most people on two wheels now are all kind of one tribe, and we’re trying to be in the front of that. Bringing in brands like Super 73 and having sponsors like LiveWire from the electric world, all of those things are really important to us.”

Six years on from that chat, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge. Bike Shed Shoreditch has gone from strength to strength and is a high-end landmark venue for motorcycling in the capital. The organisation has set up an outpost in the colonies, opening Bike Shed LA just over a year ago. And I’m standing at the Tobacco Dock exhibition space, looking at a Bike Shed Show, which is bigger and better in every way. Perhaps most impressively, the Bike Shed has achieved all that in the face of a global pandemic, a war in Europe and the toughest environment for exhibitions and hospitality in decades.

The 2023 show is the second post-pandemic event, and to my eyes, it looks like a slightly different event. The bikes cover a much wider range of tastes, with plenty of sportier

It must be exciting to see more sporty, mainstream brands like Alpinestars moving towards the Bike Shed too? “Yes, and their product lines are reflecting that. We work with them quite closely in the US with our membership and some of the experiences they do there, and we’ve got to know them very well. That has translated back onto the UK market too.”

So the bigger corporate brands are engaging more with your approach?” Yes, I think they are. They realise you can’t judge value by just numbers or data capture. It’s different now from how many people come to your show and how many email addresses you get or looking at your percentage conversion of sales. They are looking for people that are actually likely to engage with their brand and spend money, which I think we provide by having a more aspirational show that considers its customers. I think we get visitors that are actually interested in what the brands are trying to do, and we get a better match between the customers and the brands.”

Van Someren’s strong marketing background informs much of the thinking here, and he’s got an eye on the future too. If we’re going to live in a world where loud, evocative petrol engines are replaced by electric motors, brands will need to have more of a story to sell their products. “We’re moving into an electric world, so the brands have realised that they really have to engage with a brand story. Because going forward, their brand is going to be more important than their platforms. In ten years’ time, it won’t be about the twins or inline-fours; it will be about electric engines, and it will be the badge on their ‘tank’, the design. They realise now that storytelling is so important.

“Brands are moving away from spending money on industry-driven fairs, and they are really trying to meet customers at their level, and that means moving more towards events like ours because that allows brands to have a proper conversation.”

And he offers a concrete example of this storytelling. “I mean, Michelin was the headline sponsor, but they didn’t just bring piles of new tyres. They brought their podcast, and they brought tyres which had been used on the track, and we did content and storytelling. It was a different approach.”

Unconvinced by this thinking? Well, consider the fact that BMW has basically eschewed the conventional Cologne Intermot international show in its own back yard in recent years – but had a very strong presence at the Bike Shed Show this year.

On a more practical level, van Someren reckons that the show was also better this year because the Covid hangover is clearing. “Of course, in 2022, we hadn’t done a show for a couple of years, so everyone was a little

Bike Shed La

LOOKING BACK AT BDN’S 2017 interview with van Someren, there were plans for westward expansion for the Bike Shed even back then. And that’s now happened with the Bike Shed LA, which opened in April last year. But the Covid pandemic had a massive impact on the project, as the Bike Shed supremo ruefully admits. He starts off with the background to the LA branch.

“The idea came to us in 2018 when we first opened because London is a complicated and expensive city to operate in, and it’s not exactly the heart of motorcycle culture. We thought if we opened another Bike Shed, it should be in LA. We got a very warm reception for the idea, and we started trying to raise money to do it and the money came. We’d proven we could do it, and everyone agreed it would be a huge success if we could do what we did in London, in Los Angeles.

bit rusty. But for this year, we’d had two continuous years, and it was a smoother, better-run show. We had more food. We used the downstairs space better, and yeah, I did feel like it was a bigger, better, more balanced show.”

It’s a terrible habit amongst journalists –but even after a big, successful gig like the 2023 Bike Shed show, we always want to ask about what’s coming next. Luckily, van Someren is ready for my question about the 2024 show, how it can strengthen – and with a scoop announcement about a Bike Shed America show. “I think certainly, every year we try and do something a little bit different. How to use the space better, who we partner with and who comes back. Obviously, we had more exhibitors and sponsors this year. I think the Bike Shed talks we’ll do again and we’ll expand on that.

“This is the first year we had a theme, and it was ‘Past, Present, Future’ – acknowledging the past as why we are here, and the present, with one foot in the future. Next year we plan to do a show in America as well, probably in September or October, and the theme for the London and LA shows will be ‘Common Ground’. That’s the idea; regardless of where you go in the world, being a motorcycle rider is common ground and it connects us. We’re all riding for the same reasons, the same emotional reasons and the same practical reasons.

“We’ll take a lot of elements from the London show in May, almost as a roadshow, over to Los Angeles with some of the same bikes and builders, and a lot of the brands will be sponsoring both shows, so we’ll have a kind of parallel experience between the two.”

Speaking to contacts in the ‘mainstream’ bike trade after the show revealed that a few preconceptions about the Bike Shed culture had also been shattered. One after another,

“So we spent a couple of years travelling and investigating, and then we got it all together in 2019. We found a venue and a location, and we raised enough money to get going, but then in March 2020, Covid hit, so we were stopped in our tracks. London was closed, and we didn’t know if we would survive, whether London would survive, never mind LA.

“But we’d already taken on a venue, we’d started to build, we’d spent money, so we just kind of ploughed on in slow-motion. You know, fighting with travel, permits, visas. America’s borders were closed for 22 months, so we had to travel through Mexico. We had to do all sorts of weird things to get into the country. What should’ve been a project that finished in 2021 doubled in cost and doubled in time and didn’t open until 2022, 16 months late.”

“We’ve been open for over a year dealers and other key players in the trade told me how they’d been pleasantly surprised by their first visit to the show, with the range of bikes on display, the quality of the custom work, and the atmosphere. Even the architecture and surroundings of the riverside Tobacco Dock location was praised. Van Someren seems amused at the idea of converting naysayers. “I mean, we’ve been doing the same thing for a decade, and I think people are still just noticing. We’re in a very traditional industry, and some people are quite stuck in their views and a lot of people discount us until they see what we do and there’s still a long way to go!” now and we hit the ground running. The venue’s in Los Angeles in the Arts District. It operates the same way, just bigger. We have much more retail space and actually have concession partners in Los Angeles, so we have our own shop, but we host Indian Royal Enfield, Ducati, Belstaff, Bremont; it’s kind of like a Selfridge’s for bikes. And we’ve got a huge event space, the restaurant is much bigger, we’ve done 1000 meals in a day, and there’s a huge 5000sq.ft. parking area.”