Business Spotlight: The Open Road

For decades, Gene’s Gallery Inc. has been equipping people for the open road. Come fall, the road will run right through the Honda Gold Wing accessory store.

Owner Gregg McNabb is preparing to move Gene’s Gallery from its 14-year-old home on East Chestnut Expressway to make way for a bridge over the adjacent railroad tracks, along with a roadway connecting to Ingram Mill Avenue.

“It’s one of those things. We’re here for a reason, but now we’re going to move for that same reason,” McNabb says.

With the accessory road designed to travel southeast through his 1-acre property, McNabb is nearing a buyout settlement with the Missouri Department of Transportation. He’s spent the last 18 months searching for a new home and has yet to find a suitable structure.

“There’s just none out there with the same amount of traffic,” he says, pointing to the 19,000 cars that daily drive by Gene’s Gallery just west of U.S. Highway 65. “You’ll find a great building, but it’ll have 200 cars a day going by. Or you’ll find 10,000 cars a day going by, and it’s a building you can’t afford.”

Hit the road
With a move expected in September or October, McNabb says he might end up building from the ground up, and he expects to make a decision in April.

“We have two deals working, but they’re not done yet,” he says, adding proximity to the highway is key.

As the only store in Missouri exclusively selling aftermarket products for Gold Wing bikes – outside of Honda dealerships – McNabb says Gene’s Gallery has a wide pull.

“A large percentage of our people come here once or twice a year, from multiple states. On a Saturday, it’s not unusual to have four or five states represented,” he says.

Last week, a couple from Houston, Mo., made the 90-mile drive to take a second look at two three-wheel motorcycles for sale. Gene’s Gallery was selling the bikes, with the added trike kits, for about $50,000 apiece.

“This one’s got fog lights the other doesn’t have,” McNabb tells them, wearing his salesman hat minutes after ringing up a customer at the cash register.

The 4,000-square-foot showroom is packed with accessories from motorcycle helmets to chrome polish and rain suits to cargo trailers. The big-ticket items, though, are the trike kits added to two-wheel Gold Wing motorcycles for comfort and stability on the road.

With the average Gold Wing owner now age 55, McNabb says the aftermarket trike business is gaining traction.

“As you get older,” he says, “you can no longer hold up a 900-pound motorcycle. You put the trike kit on, and it takes all that away.”

That’s the story for Bernice “BC” Coleman, of Willard.

Coleman, who turns 70 next month, is on his third Gold Wing but his first trike.

“I’d been riding two wheels all the time,” he says, noting the trike style keeps him riding at his age. “I don’t have to put my feet down.

“Everybody who’s got a three-wheel now, they won’t go back.”

Common to Gold Wing riders, Coleman says he and a half-dozen others take 200-300 mile road trips over long weekends. The first one of the year is not planned, yet.

“As soon as the weather starts getting nice, with two or three days’ notice, we’ll just take off and go,” Coleman says.

Dealmaker
Gene’s Gallery orders trike conversion kits from five manufacturers, including Motor Trike and California Sidecar. McNabb made an overnight trip March 25 to Hannigan Motorsports in Kentucky to pick up a Harley trike for a customer.

The entry-level price for trikes is in the $20,000-range, McNabb says, while standard used motorcycles he sells are $10,000 and up. With a 3,500-square-foot service area, Gene’s Gallery sells about 15 custom-built trikes a year.

His biggest sale was a $53,000 trike built in 2010 for a customer in Kansas City.

That’s about the same price he paid for the business in 1989 from founders Gene and Peggy Webb. McNabb was a customer first and, at the time, it operated from a house at 1529 St. Louis St.

McNabb moved the store in 2001. Since then, he says sales have generally grown 10 percent a year.

“The industry has changed drastically,” he says. “In the last five years since the recession, we went from primarily selling parts and accessories to now mostly service and bike sales.”

McNabb says Honda dealers, such as Honda of the Ozarks, sells new Gold Wings. Honda does not make new trikes, leaving the conversion kit market open to him and other accessory store operators. He says Gene’s Gallery has about 20 peer stores across the country.

“It’s a very small, niche market,” McNabb says.

The market almost didn’t survive the Great Recession. Thousands of motorcycle stores closed in the years following 2008 as motorcycle and scooter production was cut in half from a peak in 2005, according to the Motorcycle Manufacturing Industry.

“We’ve been able to survive it. That’s been the biggest challenge to figure out where the business is going and how to get your share of it,” McNabb says.

Last year was key, he says, as sales got back to 2007 levels.

“We were fortunate to have enough reserves,” McNabb says, declining to disclose annual revenues. “You sit down and tighten your belt. You don’t buy the extra stuff. If the customer is not buying chrome, we’re not buying equipment. You pick your spots.”