CUSTOMS
Meat the man using his lean Hogs to sell his own prime cuts of custom culture. The steaks are high…
The Rusty Butcher: Californian sensation Mark Atkins.
IT’S EASY TO feel jealous of the Californians. They have the weather, countless events, world class creativity, dream destinations and boundless opportunities. On the downside, a lot of the major roads are terrible, and the traffic in the cities is apocalyptically horrendous. That said the American Dream is certainly A Thing. And saw another example of it on my most recent trip to Cali… Mark Atkins trades under the name The Rusty Butcher and works out of an industrial unit in Corona, California. Atkins is heavy-set, five-foot-five with facial tattoos and two Chihuahuas. Ditch the dogs and he’d pass for an extra in a Netflix prison drama, but really he’s a happily married, hardworking businessman with a brilliant eye for marketing and fearless bike skills. The business began making leather wallets and key rings, then confrontational T-shirts and caps (‘Eat Shit’, ‘Watch out for Motorcycles, Asshole’, etc). Atkins is a former schoolboy motocrosser, who ditched the sport as soon as his father stopped paying his entry fees, and eventually bought a Harley-davidson Sportster that he began jumping, at motocross parks and out in the semi-wilderness of inland California. Posting
professionally produced photos and well-edited short videos brought his business recognition and sponsorship. Even if people hadn’t tried to pick a 1200 Sportster off its chrome sidestand, they knew they shouldn’t be ridden like The Rusty Butcher rode them. He jumps them further than many a clubman motocrosser would be happy to leap a Honda 450. He breaks them, mends them, jumps them again… The public, me included, lapped it up. Atkins created a team of hooligan flat track racers, all with identical black and yellow Harley Sportsters, to compete in the burgeoning scene and started making parts for Sportsters. Another Californian success story, Biltwell, made a Rusty Butcher signature helmet for Atkins to sell, then, such is his intravenous feed into young biking America’s consciousness, Harley-davidson decided to have their California unveiling of the 2018 Fat Bob in his workshop, live streamed around the world. It’s nothing new to have a manufacturer associate with custom builders, but this seemed a step further. I visited the Butcher’s Den and what first struck me was I couldn’t think of a single motorcycle company in the UK that was comparable to this one. Atkins built the business while still in his 20s, he’d only turned 30 the month before I visited. Yet there were 20 Harleys, nearly all fuelled up and ready to rip, in his workshop, and the majority belonged to his company. Race bikes, jump bikes, projects, development mules. Outside was the firm’s late-model graphite grey Mercedes hightop Sprinter on expensive alloy wheels. In design terms, the shop front is a mix of delicatessen and burlesque club. Vintage cleavers hang from the wall, the company’s range of leather goods sit on meat trays in a glassfronted counter/chiller. In the back is the leather workshop, T-shirt printing set-up and storage, and a kitchen that would shame most new build homes. And Atkins has a new partner, Jonathan Griffith, one of the photographers who helped build the company’s image. ‘I get a lot of my inspiration from Disneyland,’
says Atkins. ‘Their attention to detail is insane.’ The Rusty Butcher doesn’t appear to cut any corners. Everything is so well realised. A company with a similar focus in the UK would be run from a domestic garage, or an uninviting unit. The Rusty Butcher thinks, and acts, big with such a glossy sheen, a relatively small range of self-produced products and an air of success. Undoubtedly, it’s just a scale thing. The US is so big – Harley have sold over 60,000 Sportsters per year in the US since the late-’80s, so even a niche is enormous compared with the UK. But I think part of it is attitude too. So many Brits think they can do everything themselves, and even if they can’t, they’re dismissive of most others’ custom efforts and ambition. Hopefully that view is changing for the better.