PY:

Editor's Note: Late last year Paul Yaffe visited Australia to be a part of the country’s leading biker event, the Gold Coast Bike Week, held on Queensland’s sunny Gold Coast. Heavy Duty magazine and Bikernet contributor Glenn Priddle took pics of the event and interviewed Paul.

Paul, welcome to Australia.

PY: Thank you for having me.

Are you enjoying Gold Coast Bike Week?

PY: Yep, sure am. This is my first time to Australia and it’s been a fantastic trip. The people here are very warm and friendly and the Custom Central guys are a great bunch of guys. The bikers here are just like they are all over the world; they’re enthusiastic, passionate and love the lifestyle.

How did your visit come about?

PY: Brad Parpit, the owner of Custom Central and Australian Motorcycle Importers and I have been working together over the past 8 months to get Paul Yaffe’s Original product line and the Bagger Nation’s product line in their warehouses and into their shops. Now we’re starting to build some bikes for them. It just seemed to make sense, the timing was good. We just sent them a couple of containers that they received – they’ve got a big Paul Yaffe display in their store that I wanted to see. I want to turn it into kind of a kiosk and do some point of purchase stuff for it; packaging and signage and that type of stuff.

It just made sense to come out. This is Brad’s first year being part of Australia’s Gold Coast Bike Week. It worked out to come down, put faces to names, meet his crew, and offer any assistance I can in any of his purchasing or choices.

Where is his shop?

PY: It’s near Brisbane; specifically it’s at 682 Beaudesert Road, Rocklea. It’s a brand new shop and he’s done a really nice job with it. It’s a big shop. They’re carrying full lines of my stuff, plus West Coast Choppers, Custom Chrome, several different exhaust lines. They’ve got an excellent clothing store upstairs with all kinds of lifestyle clothing – it’s really nicely done.

Is it just parts and accessories?

PY: No, it’s parts and service. They’re doing some custom builds there and stuff and some fabrication. He has a separate dealer network which is Australian Motorcycle Imports that is his dealer-based wholesale company and that’s two huge warehouses several miles away from shop that are filled with product. It’s very impressive, an amazing warehouse.

How does the Australian bike scene as exemplified by Bike Week compare with the American scene from what you’ve seen so far?

PY: Mmm, how would you compare it? Well, it’s smaller though I want to say it’s very similar, you know what I mean? I feel like I’m at an Easyriders Rodeo, basically, it’s that kind of thing. If there was camping out on the grass and at night there was the zoo, you know, out on the campgrounds, it would be just like an Easyriders Rodeo. Lots of spectators, fun and games, dynos, bike games, bands, shows, girlies - you know, it’s all the things bikers love.

They love to come out and see all this. The fans of motorcycles too, just seein’ all the different brands and seein’ all kinds of people’s work. You know, hooking up with different shops and stuff that they might not have known about. It’s great place to network for the whole motorcycle industry I’m sure.

How do you find riding on the right side of the road?

PY: Weird, really weird to start with! It’s hard enough just being in a car on the wrong side of the road. Every time we’d go around a corner and a car would come I’d say, ‘oh my god, we’re gonna head on!’ So that was startling.

Then a few days ago, I got on a bike and I rode with a bunch of guys, so that wasn’t too bad, I just kinda followed their lead, you know. Then the next day, I got up in the morning and everybody had left, so I was on my own and totally got lost, went all the way down to the beach, halfway down the Coast. That was a little weird including the fact that I went into oncoming traffic twice, but managed to see what I was doing and stopped in time.

It’s just what you’re used to, so, it’s cool. We went up into the canyons the other day, to where that natural bridge is up there. It was absolutely beautiful, like riding up into a rain forest. It was gorgeous, great riding.

How long have you been in business?

PY: This is my 22nd year.

Most of Australia would know about you through the Discovery Biker Build Off Series. You were really riding a wave then as that show really made media celebrities of builders.

PY: It sure did, it certainly did, and it changed that part of our lives.

Put you on the map for the public, so to speak?

PY: Yeah! Well, as ‘Paul Yaffe Originals’ - as a brand name and as a recognised builder in the country - we were very successful before the Biker Build Offs. We had a very successful parts catalog with many distributors in Europe and in the States, so business-wise we were doing very well. But I didn’t walk through an airport and have people ask for my autograph, which now happens and that’s a bit weird.

During the three or four years when they were airing them, and we did the four shows, there were probably around 20 different other shows we did also. We did one for NBC TV, we did travel channel stuff and we did American Thunder Episodes and Speed Vision Specials – we did a lot of shows. I think about 40. We have a four-hour loop of shows that runs in the shop.

It got crazy and then the shows started hiring us as celebrities to come and do autographs and sign posters and that was pretty weird too. I think I’m lucky as it never really went to my head, it was just somethin’ to do, you know, ‘Glad You want me to come and hang around, we’re all gonna have some fun’. I didn’t change my business plan, I didn’t go buy some huge expensive shop or start treatin’ myself like a rock star.

It was kinda fun while it lasted and there are new shows coming up all the time and we’re happy to do what we can, but things in the industry are settling down and getting back to normal and that’s fine with me.

Well, you can probably get on with what you really want to do eh?

PY: Sure, Sure. It’s been very nice here to walk around. People say ‘hi’ and ‘nice to meet you’, whatever, but in the United States there’s a different air about it. People are more … well, they are almost of the opinion that they know you because they’ve seen you on TV and they act like they’re your best friend and that’s somewhat intrusive at times. Australians seem a bit different, it’s, ‘Hey, nice to meet ya, I’ll let ya have some space’. It’s very nice, very nice.

Did the Discovery Series make a big difference with your sales?

PY: No, no, I wouldn’t say so. We were crazy busy before it started. I’d say for the past 10 years, maybe more, we’ve constantly had 40 –50 pretty high end crazy ‘ground-up’ builds. My company is also a little more diverse than most. I have my parts catalogs, I have my distributor businesses, and I also am part of several design teams for different corporations like Custom Chrome, SuperTrapp a couple of different wheel companies that I do design work for.

Actually, I do a lot of royalty-type design work. I’m on a couple of engineering teams, problem solving stuff like that. I also have a retail store and I also have a service business. If choppers slow right down, I’ve got plenty of other things to do. Some of the guys that are so focused, the guys that do big ‘ground-ups’ and I think those guys are really hurting. For us, you know, the fab shop just started makin’ more handlebars instead of building more custom frames. We’re just doin’ something different and they were actually happy with it.

The ‘ground-up; customs can get a little stressful, ‘cause they’re so involved. Our engineering standards at our shop are, well let’s say I’m a fairly tough guy to satisfy. I’m so much about the riding; it’s not so much the show as much as the bike has to be totally rideable when it’s done and reliable too. I’m tooting my own horn here but we do a really good job. We have a very reliable and very durable bike. I don’t usually see my customers unless they chip the paint. Or need an oil change. Once I build the bikes they love ‘em.

So would your philosophy be considered Function over Form?

PY: I’m very motivated by form …

But you’re still thinking it has to be functional?

PY: Oh yeah! I wouldn’t head off in a direction that won’t work, just to look cool. Sometimes I see some of the wild stuff they’re doin’ out there and part of me goes ‘I could do my own crazy stuff’ then I look at the bikes and think, ‘Well, that won’t work, it’s not rideable’. When I’m a judge at a show I’ll walk right past a great crazy lookin’ bike, ‘cause I know it’s got a half gallon gas tank and the chain’s already rubbin’ on both ends of the swing arm and so on. I think, ‘Who’d wanna ride that?’

The bikes I build, I ride ‘em to Sturgis, I ride ‘em to Daytona, my customers ride with me, we ride all over the country.

I’m a Hamster, which is all about riding custom motorcycles and we ride thousands of miles every month going to different events. That’s really what we’re about, and that’s why I got into this – because of my love of riding. You know what I mean? The custom stuff and the designs and stuff I do is to enhance that, and there’s some ego involved too, everybody likes cool stuff. To me it’s all about riding. I think our industry is settling back to being all about riding. And the people who treat this as a lifestyle and the love of the lifestyle are always gonna be doin’ stuff. They’re always gonna want cool stuff, wanting a set of handle bars or a set of pipes or whatever. The people that have jumped on the fad, or saw us on TV and thought, ‘I’m gonna make a million bucks and be a rock star’, well they’ve been disappointed and they’re going’ home with a few less bucks in their pocket and that’s fine with me too. Yeah, that’s quite fine with me. I really like this lifestyle, it’s what I live.

Well, I can witness that. I was with Keith Ball on the way to Sturgis and we were having a meal. Then we noticed that you were in the booth next to us at Flagstaff with your buddies and all your bikes lined up outside on your way there too.

PY:Yeah! 2008 was my 21st year of riding to Sturgis. I build a bike every year and ride it there.

That’s great.

PY: This year I copped out a little and I rode a bagger! Normally I’m on some little hard tail that kills me all the way there! But this year I took Suzy with me. It was a custom bagger, mind you!

Yeah! it wouldn’t be regular bagger.

PY: No, we put on 23 inch wheels, so on and so forth, but yeah, we rode the touring bike up there.

What’s your background?

PY: Well, that’s a kinda sordid tale, a little bit of it anyway. I mean, as a kid growing’ up I had all sorts of jobs, grocery bagger to whatever. Then I fell into a job managing a shoe company, a retail sales company. Through a chain of events – and here I’ll make a long story short – I ended up designing high end women’s shoes.

Really?

PY: Yeah.

Sorry, didn’t mean to laugh.

PY: That’s okay, I laugh at it too! I was very good at it. Because of my designs a huge international company was created but I hated it. While it was successful for me at an early age (I was very young, 18 or 19 years old at the time), I quickly found out that the fashion industry is not for me. It was not what I wanted to do, but it did afford me the ability to play with my motorcycles, which was just a hobby back then.

I liked doin’ stuff in my garage and then – long story short again – a lot of friends saw the stuff I was doin’ to my bike, they liked it and then it was ‘Hey, will ya do that to my bike?’ So we first started out doin’ stuff with buddies on the weekends in the garage. I just liked it and I wanted to learn more about it. Some of the natural talent I had was in fabrication, particularly metal bending. Sheet metal forming was something that came to me, absolutely self taught. But I wanted to learn more about four stroke engine theory, electrical theory and so on. I wanted to know the ins and outs and what makes ‘em tick from the bottom up. So I moved from Los Angeles where I was born and raised and went to Phoenix where the Motorcycles Mechanics Institute is located and I attended MMI for a year and a half.

In the United States that’s the official Harley Davidson training centre. You go through about six months of rigorous two and four stroke college, and then you actually get your hands dirty and get into all kinds of different aspects of mechanics. At the end of it you take about 6 months of classes of specific Harley Davidson theory learning about their cool V- twins. So I went through that always thinking that I’d move back to LA, but by the time I was done with school I’d kinda gotten comfortable with Phoenix, which was kinda a small town when I first moved there.

It’s not so small now.

PY: No, now it’s not! It’s unbelievable what’s happened there. I’m glad I bought some real estate early on!

How big is your shop?

PY: It’s 12,000 square feet.

How many staff?

PY: Twenty right now. The Bagger Nation stuff is doing very well.

Is it easy to find staff?

PY: No, absolutely not! None of my staff had any motorcycle experience when I hired them. I refuse to hire from within the industry.

Really?

PY: I won’t do it. Just a lot of bad experiences.

So you want to teach them yourself?

PY: What I do, is if I want a fabricator, I’ll go to a gate shop or a tech college and pull a welder out of there and teach him what he needs to know. My guys are career guys and they’re very well taken care of. They make a good living. They all have houses, mortgages, families, and 410ks. Some of my guys make about the same as I do. It’s well deserved; I’m only as good as my crew.

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