GILROY
– By the time Indian Motorcycle might get back in business with
a new owner, dozens of its dealers – including its hometown
salesman – may have started carrying a competing brand of American
cruiser
GILROY – By the time Indian Motorcycle might get back in business with a new owner, dozens of its dealers – including its hometown salesman – may have started carrying a competing brand of American cruiser.
Victory Motorcycles’ wooing of Don Nofrey, who owns Gilroy’s Indian dealership and custom shop, has been successful. If all goes as planned, Nofrey says, he’ll be changing the name of his Monterey Street shop to “Victory-Indian of Gilroy” in six weeks or so. Victory hasn’t asked him to sell their bikes exclusively, he said, and he wouldn’t want to anyway.
“I’m going to still carry the Indian flag as long as humanly possible,” Nofrey said – but he won’t put Indian first in his shop name because the Gilroy-based company “wasn’t a victory.”
Indian shut down operations without warning on Sept. 19, laying off about 380 workers. Its headquarters/
factory and its trademarks are now up for sale to pay off a long list of creditors.
Nofrey still hasn’t been accepted by Victory’s parent
comp-any, Polaris – more famous for snow-mobiles, all-terrain vehicles and personal watercraft
than for motorcycles – but he doesn’t foresee much of a problem with their final line of questioning, which concerns his financing.
Victory is making the most of its West Coast competitor’s absence, targeting many of Indian’s 200 or so dealers and trying to sway them into selling Victory bikes. The same day Indian called it quits, Nofrey said he got a call from Victory. Eight days later, he was at Polaris’ corporate headquarters in Minnesota, a guest of the company along with about 40 other Indian dealers.
“I went out there with a closed mind,” Nofrey said. “I was very, very skeptical.”
The Polaris people proved they had done their homework, giving each dealer an individual chart showing his sales, market share and market penetration.
“I was so impressed with their organizational ability; it just floored me,” Nofrey said.
Then he got to ride Victory’s bikes, and that’s when he really got excited.
“I was very impressed by the performance, the handling,” Nofrey said.
Victory, billed as “the new American motorcycle,” was until recently the third-biggest U.S. motorcycle maker behind Harley-Davidson and Indian. Its name recognition appears to be lower than its competitors’; a poll the Victory people shared with Nofrey showed that 100 percent of people asked knew of Harley, 54 percent knew of Indian and 34 percent had heard of Victory.
Polaris began full-scale production of Victory bikes at a designated factory in Iowa in 1998 – a year before Indian came back in Gilroy after 45 years of dormancy. Polaris came into being in 1954 – a year after the original Indian Motorcycle Company closed in Springfield, Mass.
Nofrey said he thinks Victory’s target customer is the same as Indian’s: “someone that wants something different from Harley, wants something American, something powerful.”
The Gilroy dealer also thinks he’ll be able to sell more bikes with Victory’s top-end retail price of $14,900 for a non-custom bike. Non-custom Indians start at $16,900.
