THE WORLD’S BIGGEST USED BIKE SHOP…
… and it’s in Macclesfield, England.
For most of us, the involuntary mouthing of silent swear words is usually reserved for our first sight of sporting lunacy: Josh Brookes over the Mountain at Cadwell Park; Michael Dunlop at the bottom of Bray Hill. But here’s a new non-sporting one for you: walking into the world’s biggest used bike showroom.
‘Yeah, we’re thinking of setting up a reaction cam by the door,’ says Superbike Factory boss Scott Behrens as we watch three gents stroll in, stop dead in their tracks and do foulmouthed guppy impressions. One thousand motorcycles doesn’t seem overly impressive when written in a sentence, but in one room, in neat rows and all with price stickers on, it’s utterly flabbergasting.
And the longer you look, the more startling it is –glance in one direction and there are rows of GSX-RS (I stopped counting at 20), gaze down another aisle and there seem to be endless Triumphs (actually 131). There are 170 Yamahas and more of several popular models than a medium-sized dealer’s entire used stock. The place is mesmerising. At Superbike Factory’s old showroom – also in Macclesfield –they occasionally sold 40 bikes a day and it’s expected the new showroom will easily exceed that.
This is used bike selling on an unprecedented scale – the volume of stock is so great that their pricing can affect the entire UK market. ‘We’re very conscious that we can drag the market down by pricing too low during winter,’ says Scott. ‘We have good relationships with a lot of dealers and we know that a lot of them set their prices by looking at our website and working backwards.’ It’s like a used motorcycle Ark Royal amid a flotilla of rowing boats.
‘It’s certainly the biggest used bike showroom in Britain,’ says Scott, rather more accurately, ‘but we’re not sure about the rest of the world.’ Bike’s investigations suggest that there is none bigger on the planet.a Harley dealer in the USA has a larger footprint (and a tattoo parlour and wedding chapel), but only stocks a piing 250 bikes. Macclesfield ¢, USA 0. The sheer scale of the operation creates novel problems
– or challenges as Scott calls them. Me riding round on a scooter was a wheeze dreamed up for the photos, but actually isn’t such a bad idea because each aisle is 250m long which means getting from GSX-RS to Harleys –should that time of life have arrived –is a five minute amble. More importantly from Scott’s perspective, it means potential buyers could be a long way from an assistant when they want one.
Oddly, scooters are not his chosen solution. ‘If you were looking at a bike down there,’ Scott says pointing at the far corner, a ¼km away, ‘and you had to walk to reception to ask about a bike, that’s not great. So we’re installing ¢¤ pods across the floor which have screens where you can find out a bit more about the bike you’re looking at, then register your
interest and someone will pop over to that pod to talk to you. When you’ve got 150 people in here, looking after the five people who really want to buy a bike is critical.’
Then there’s the dreaded problem of someone knocking a machine over – to get all 1000 bikes in, they’re parked close enough for a very expensive game of dominos. ‘When you grow as a business, you can forget why you’ve done some of the things you did on the way. That’s happened to us here with the bikes being close together.
‘In the first week we had a few hundred customers and they were all sitting on the bikes and I suddenly remembered why we put signs on the bikes saying ‘ask for an advisor if you want to sit on the bike’ at the old showroom.’ No bikes went over, but now the bikes are pulled into the aisles when customers want to sit on them.
Because of the monumental amount of stock – Scott won’t put a figure on it, but an average price of £5000 a bike works out at £5m sitting on the showroom floor and another £1m in the workshop area – the business can’t afford to have bikes hanging around. Which is why the prices are so keen. Search for pretty much any model on the major selling sites and Superbike Factory prices are generally the lowest.
‘A Us‘‘aharleydealerintheusa Harley dealer in the USA has a larger footprint (and a wedding chapel), but only stocks 250 bikes. Macclesfield 1, USA 0’
‘For us, this is not about holding on to bikes,’ says Scott. ‘If the market dictates we can only make a small amount of money on it, I’m fine with that. Our business is about moving it, and moving on to the next bike. I don’t want to see them sat on the showroom.
‘When I first got into selling bikes, I was talking to a dealer as we walked through his showroom and he was pointing at bikes saying ‘that’s had its birthday, that’s had its birthday, that’s had its birthday.’ Being naive at the time I didn’t know what he was on about. But what he meant was that each of those bikes had been in stock for over a year. For me that felt wrong. I don’t want to tell you what the average time one of our bikes stays on the showroom floor, but let’s just say none have had their birthday.’
Of course, the suspicion here is that the by-product of huge stock, cheap prices and fast turnover is shoddy quality. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Superbike Factory’s Trustpilot rating shows 79% of customers rate them as Excellent, with just 8% rating them as bad. Clearly not perfect, but compared to Car Supermarket (42% excellent, 42% bad), it looks strong for a big operation.
It’s also impressive considering that a lot of customers
– Scott won’t put a figure on it – buy bikes over the internet without viewing them in the metal. ‘This is huge for us. If someone wants to buy and they’re on the south coast, we’ll do walkaround videos of the bike, send detailed pics, do a full blemish report and deliver it [they have a fleet of 20 vans]. I’ll even deliver it to their door if they want to view it. If we can make the buying process easier, we’ll do it.’
So how do they achieve the quality to ensure these internet buyers aren’t disappointed?
Primarily, through a huge workshop facility that’s got more in common with a factory production line than a dealership. Scott is cagey about how many bikes will go through here in the summer, but the old showroom used to see 50 a day and the new workshop is far bigger and slicker. Many of the processes are normal, but with specialist facilities to speed things up. So the deep clean is done in a special jetwash booth rather than out the back, and the sales photography happens in a purpose built studio with a turntable and bespoke camera software which automatically crops around the bike to save time.
The two inhouse inspections (the other was done when they bought the bike) are even more normal – mechanic looks at bike on ramp. The clever bit is how they avoid doing road tests. ‘The bike is run up to temperature,’ says Scott, ‘and goes on a rolling road which simulates a test ride and gives the customer a full dyno chart. The dyno is also fitted with equipment to check frame alignment. At the old showroom we were test riding everything on the local roads – that can be 40-50 bikes a day – and it wasn’t sensible.’ Even the software needed to keep track of the bikes as they go through the workshop, some waiting for parts, others disappearing for an MOT off-site, was hard to come by. ‘Because of the scale of what we’re doing, we had to build the production flow software from the ground up because noone has done anything like this before.’
Which does beg the question, why? The whole thing sounds like pushing water uphill. Even moving into the new place involved staff working round the clock – they had to move 1100 bikes across Macclesfield over a single weekend. Scott is clearly a clever bloke and I wonder how he ended up filling up warehouses with more bikes than anyone else, ever. ‘My background was in finance. I set up a car finance company with my best mate and we had a stock of cars that we’d sell and through that we got an opportunity to sell bikes. In the first two weeks we bought 18 and when I started selling them I realised it was a totally different product to cars because of the passion.
‘I was hooked. I’d ridden dirt bikes as a kid, but a bad back meant I couldn’t ride any more. After selling those bikes it was an easy decision to stop selling cars – every customer has a story, they want to talk about bikes. I’ve never known a market like it. I love it when a customer comes in and says, “I must have a green one,” and then they say, “can you drop it off down the road from my house, and pick up my old bike while you’re there?”. And you think, “I get what you’re doing – there’s someone at home who won’t notice a new bike if it’s the same colour”. That’s a surprisingly regular occurrence.’ After a 90 minute walk, my time is up and we’re back to where we came in, watching the new customers mouthing obscenities as they take in the shiny £5m vista. Scott seems more relaxed, perhaps realising I haven’t the brains to work out how he buys so many bikes so cheaply (industry contacts and a slick internet operation is as far as I get). ‘This is my first ever interview,’ he admits. ‘Before this I didn’t feel the need to put myself into the public eye. But this is something I want people to see. I want people to experience this.’
‘The volu‘‘thevolume volume of stock is so great that their pricing can affect the entire UK market’