Behind the scenes at stylish British helmet maker Davida
How a British company that started life in a garage rekindled our love of retro protection
To build a business you need passion. And passion is something Davida founder David Fiddaman has in abundance. A lifelong motorcyclist, racking up massive mileages on his Hayabusa, Fiddaman set out to make products he’d want for himself and his friends.
The Davida story starts in 1975 in Fiddaman’s mother’s garage. All the best businesses start in garages, it seems. The first Davida Moto product was carb balancing vacuum gauges, something the firm continues to produce. Then came fork braces and braced box-section swingarms in the early 1980s which found an eager audience keen to improve the sketchy handling of Japanese superbikes. Today, Davida is the UK’s only builder of standards-compliant helmets, plying its trade in a sector that is not only competitive but rightly and properly tightly regulated. Davida is also the smallest certified helmet maker in the world with the same level of development and costs as any of the major brands. Davida’s first foray into helmets came in 1984 with the Classic: a pudding-basin style lid just like the ones your dad or grandad might have worn back in the 1960s and 1970s.“When we began making the pudding basin style helmet it was a shock to many in the industry. It was quickly adopted by the rocker scene in London and satisfied the insatiable Japanese appetite for English motorcycling heritage at the time,” says Fiddaman.
Then came the road-legal Classic Jet in 1990. “This was the highest quality open face you could buy with a leather lining and hand-sprayed shells,” says Fiddaman.
In subsequent years, Davida’s open
face lids went though various refinements. CAD designs meant the firm could create helmets that eliminated lift at speed while maintaining an emphasis on quality. While Davida has become rightly renowned for its safe and stylish open face lids, it has also realised a long-held ambition to produce a full face helmet.
The Koura has just gone on sale and it certainly offers something different to the mainstream options. Fiddaman added: “It’s a modern safety product that embraces Davida’s unique aesthetics.” Much more than a marketing line, that’s the ethos that has seen Davida flourish in competitive markets.