What's New at Classic Motorworks

Beating Back Backorders

We've been quite busy the past few months. Our parts manager Tim has been working lots of overtime making changes in our warehouse, inventory, and ordering systems. We are confident that his changes will help us get an improved balance in our inventory to help reduce the bane of everyone's existence: backorders.

In the motorcycle business, because of the nature of the supply chains and lead-times involved, it's a common practice not to take backorders at all. With many of our competitors, you just have to call back some other time and hope they have the part. For us, while our typical order fill rate is high, we do occasionally run out of supply (on rare or popular parts) which turn into backorders.

Tim has come up with some good ideas and systems to help minimize this problem so we are all very excited.

Spring Feeding Frenzy

Since it's spring, the office the phones are lighting up and the office is alive with the hustle and bustle that goes with one of our busiest seasons. Tait and Doneen are filling bike orders as fast as they can process them. Tim and Dorothy are working on our parts and inventory system... myself, Jane and Tait are giving technical advice and taking orders... Jim is working on our R&D projects, giving tech advice and taking orders... and Jeff and Tai are filling and shipping orders (which is more difficult than it sounds).

New Store On the Horizon?

No one is quite sure what Rhett (our web geek) is doing, nor do we really want to know.

He's been in hiding working on a new online store that he's sure will amaze all of us and even indicate inventory status to online customers.

However, he's also been buying me dinner all week because I bet him that it wouldn't be up by now and it isn't.

I found a cot stuffed underneath his desk and he seems to do best after dark, so we try not to bother him or ask too many questions.

Sidecar Mania

Sidecars sales have been crazy. We sold an entire container full of sidecars just in record time. I have to say, it caught us by surprise but fortunately we have more in the pipeline.

Interestingly, we're now selling a lot of them to non-Royal Enfield owners.

Harley Sportsters, Moto-Guzzi's and Triumph's seem to be markets that warming up to the Cozy. Working closely with the Canadian Cozy importer, we were able to unearth a new and better source for universal sidecar mounting kits, so short supply and long lead times should soon be a thing of the past.

Motorcycle Trailers

We are still waiting for our first batch of those cute one-wheel trailers. Unlike many (how bout most) motorsports products imported from an up-and-coming eastern country, our products follow all qualification and documentation guidelines for legal use, so it takes a bit longer to get through all of the required Government paperwork. We continue to enjoy our prototypes and entertain calls from interested customers, so we can say with confidence that the wait will be worth it.

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