SPECIALIST SPOTLIGHT: SHAD

After getting it start designing and producing luggage and seats for some of the biggest names in the game, Shad has gone on to cement its place as one of the go-to names for top quality luggage for your ride.

For those in the know, Shad has made a name for itself by designing, manufacturing and selling luggage for all manner of two-wheeled machines right across the motorcycling and scootering spectrum, no matter whether you’re into adventure bikes or commuter scooters. But believe it or not, that's not how the Spanish brand got its start.

The Shad brand is actually a subsidiary of NADSL, a company which was founded in 1973 just outside Barcelona. It started out exclusively manufacturing seats for motorcycles – primarily for the manufacturers which were located in the region including Derbi, Montesa, Bultaco and Sanglas. And from there the brand and its client base only got bigger and bigger.

Come the 1980s, European riders had finally cottoned on to the fact that the bikes and scooters out of Japan were top quality bits of kit, and with machines from Yamaha, Honda and Suzuki selling in great numbers, there was demand for a reliable manufacturer of top quality seats. That’s where NADSL came in. It then added Piaggio Spain to the client mix, which only helped the brand cement its place as the biggest and best European manufacturer of motorcycle seats. Thing continued to go well and by the early nineties NADSL had added Peugeot, BMW and MBK (Yamaha’s French manufacturing arm) to the every growing mix. With little room for further growth in the seat-making market, the Spanish brand decided to take advantage of its knowhow of plastic injection moulding and strong relationships with some of the biggest names in the game, and get into the business of developing and producing side cases and top boxes for bikes.

It started out making a custom range exclusively for BMW, before going on to kit out Yamaha’s Tenere adventure bike. But it was not until the tail end of the nineties that the company released its first consumer focused SHAD top case, which came with a capacity of 22 litres and could be fitted to a massive range of motorcycles and scooters from the time (thanks to its extensive range of accessories and fixtures).

From the end of the 90s NADSL continued to grow and grow, eventually becoming the leading European producer of top boxes (as well as seats) for the range of the biggest motorcycle manufacturers across the globe.

In fact, the SHAD brand is now present in over 60 countries worldwide, but incredibly, all the design, development, production and storage of its entire OEM equipment is carried out at its central production facilities in Mollet del Valles, down the road from where it started, just outside Barcelona.