As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
a price decrease at the expense of the dealers...This pricing puts us under all of the other main European brands
The margin for dealer and us has been cut dramatically to get this pricing
I went over and talked to our KTM dealer who just took on Sherco. He is not to happy about the importer cutting the prices, it is not possible for him to make any money at all, but he still has to pay rent and utilities. On top of that, the importer says they can sell direct bypassing the dealer while offering the dealer a "commission"
This may be a short sighted plan to sell bikes, but it won't make for very good dealer support in the future.
for sure, this dealer will enthusiastically promote those sherco bikes, and happyly recoomend them to his customers, instead of recommending one of those ktm where he's earning some money.it is not possible for him to make any money at all, but he still has to pay rent and utilities.
the strategy to bypass and/or eliminate dealers is not new, it has been tried by quite a few motorcycle companies, and to my knowledge always failed.I get the feeling he did not want to go this route but was forced to because of the lack of orders from dealers.
You can't stop can you?Sounds like a good deal for the customer until he needs to go tot he dealer and get the no, you did not buy that hear speech. My dealings with Clay have always been good, seems like a very good person. He may be between a rock and hard place on this. Those are very nice process in this day and age. I would look seriously at these if I was int he market for new bike. But in the end would probably buy a bike on a smoking deal from Bills and support my local dealer who is always there for us. I just got some pricing from them on the left over 2014 and looks great. Wise I had some extra coin for a TC250.
I am not sure of the timing, I know he has two bikes, one of which he is racing. I kind of got the feeling that he committed to Sherco a few months before the new pricing came out.Did you dealer order any 2014 Shercos before the new pricing was announced? I know Clay Stuckey very well and I get the feeling he did not want to go this route but was forced to because of the lack of orders from dealers. With the new pricing, he is only asking dealers to stock 1 bike for demonstration purposes and is giving a bigger than normal discount on that 1 bike. Clay has committed to Sherco but it seems that most of his dealers were not. I have a feeling that this will work out for him better than a lot of people think. I wouldn't think twice about buying a bike online and having it shipped to me as long as I knew that the Dist had a good supply of spare parts.
I was referring to you adding to the stable. Looking at my post it was pretty vague lolHuh?
I was referring to you adding to the stable. Looking at my post it was pretty vague lol
They've made them competitive with Beta which is a good thing. I really never considered how this affected the dealers until you guys mentioned everything. The one thing I thought was odd is that I can go to my dealer to look at one and then call the distributor and buy one. There's no way to have accountability for that