By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town – When BMW Motorrad decided on a radical rethink of the way it presents its motorcycles to the public, few people would have bet on a sleepy tourist destination as the location for the first presentation of a whole new retail concept.
San Francisco, sure; Munich, maybe; possibly even Beijing – but Cape Town?
Nevertheless, South Africa’s Mother City has unique qualifications as a site for the Blue Propeller brand; it is within an hour’s ride of some of the world’s finest motorcycling roads - both tar and gravel - and it’s blessed with great riding weather for at least nine months of the year.
While the motorcycle market in South Africa is small, BMW enjoys one of its biggest market share percentages here. And finally, at the time when the concept of “Make Life a Ride” was hatched, Cape Town didn’t have a franchised BMW motorcycle dealer.
Enter Leon Potgieter and Mark Philp, owners of a BMW franchise in nearby Stellenbosch. They were keen to open a second branch in the city’s CBD and when they saw the proposals for the new retail space design on a visit to Munich, they jumped at it, telling Stephan Schaller, global president of BMW Motorrad, that they could have a such a store up and running before the end of 2014.
Schaller admits he was sceptical.
“But I told them, if they could get it done, I would come down there to open it,” he said.
And so, R40 million later, on Wednesday 26 November, Schaller came to Cape Town to open the world’s first ‘Make Life a Ride’ concept store, visible expression of a paradigm shift in BMW’s brand positioning.
BUT WHY IS IT SO DIFFERENT?
Ninety years ago, when Max Fritz launched the first BMW motorcycle, he approached it from the viewpoint of his background as an aircraft engineer. In aviation, engineering excellence is a survival mechanism, and Fritz’s R32 was built to the same standard.
As are motorcycles bearing the Blue Propeller badge to this day, and they have always been publicised that way, as superbly engineered machines for knowledgeable enthusiasts.
But, in the same way that you no longer have to know how to write code to use a computer, today’s riders are more interested in what they can do with their motorcycles than in how they work. More than ever before, riding has become an emotional, rather than a mechanical experience.
“Customers are changing the way they inform themselves and communicate with us,” said Schaller. “That means we have to challenge ourselves continually to think from the rider’s perspective.”
POST-INDUSTRIAL STYLING
It also means a lifestyle centre with a comfortable coffee shop, a clothing store, beautifully lit motorcycles in an uncrowded sales area, emotionally charged décor based on images and artefacts from across BMW’s 90 year history (including a handful of superbly customised ‘bobbers’ - this from a company that in the past actively discouraged customers from fitting aftermarket exhaust systems!) and an astonishingly clean and well-equipped workshop, with special machines that can accomplish even messy jobs such as oil changes without spilling a drop on the pale grey floor.
But what’s perhaps most impressive is that the clean, post-industrial styling and emphasis on what your bike can do for you, rather than on what you need to do for your bike, are as relevant to the true petrolhead as they are to the new-millennium biker who wouldn’t know a camshaft from a con-rod but who rides purely for the feeling of freedom that it brings in an increasingly conformist world.
Someday, says Schaller, all BMW dealerships will be like this, filled with a much wider range of bikes, including scooters smaller than the current 600cc maxis, bikes under 500cc built in collaboration with an Indian partner, all built to Max Fritz’s uncompromising standards.
Chew on this, rival niche-market players: Schaller refuses to set an upper limit on production, preferring instead to boost demand by expanding into new segments.
Donford Motorrad is at 112 Buitengracht in Cape Town.