Buying a comfortable motorcycle isn’t easy if you’re a 5-foot female. Most motorcycles are manufactured for men.
But a petite pastor, Kathleen Steele Tolleson of Daytona Beach, said her long-time biker experience and contacts have helped her create Roar Motorcycles for Women, a business that caters to women riders.
From diamond-tufted seats and matching saddlebags to custom colors and artwork on lowered and modified bikes, Roar’s showroom is crowded with specialty creations for this growing segment of motorcycle buyers.
“I want to be the Martha Stewart of the motorcycle industry,” Tolleson said.
She is banking her business on research she and her business-consultant husband have found, including the Motorcycle Industry Council trade association numbers touting more than 4.3 million women motorcyclists. And a marketing survey from Women Riders Now, an information bureau, which indicates a 36 percent jump during the last 10 years.
A spokesman for the Motorcycle Industry Council said numbers haven’t been documented for five years, since the Council’s last study in 2003, but a sales survey is under way.
“Anecdotally speaking,” MIC spokesman Mike Mount said his organization’s 325 member companies are reporting increased female foot-traffic coming through their doors.
Harley-Davidson also is reporting increases, and spokesman Mike Morgan pointed to an event during this year’s Bike Week as a perfect example.
An H-D Muscular Dystrophy charity ride, originally limited to 105 women, drew such an incredible response that H-D decided to increase the size to 500 women riders, the largest in their history, Morgan said.
So, convinced that women riders need their own stuff, Minnesota-born Tolleson incorporated Roar in 2005 and began her prowl. She spent more than the first year leveraging credit and studying the market. Late last year she leased a showroom and work area at 897 Bellevue Ave. and started assembling the staff.
Tolleson’s two daughters, an experienced designer, a leather craftsman and a mechanic are among her motorcycle-customizing crew.
“I learned to ride motorcycles on a dirt road when I was 10 or 11 years old. My dad was a snowmobile dealer, and when I was a teenager, my ex-husband’s father was into stock car racing,” Tolleson said. She got into it all.
“I enjoyed speed and things that had motors, but when I divorced and remarried, my (new) husband didn’t ride.” She went 15 years without getting on a motorcycle. “He just hadn’t been around them.”
With her husband, Rodney Tolleson, 60, she co-pastors Daytona City Church on Bay Street. A few years ago, when she wanted to go back to riding — he also learned to ride. And when she expressed an interest in going into business, he used his business-consultant skills, formerly reserved for such clients as property managers, insurance sales and chiropractors, to help her.
“After studying it, we both felt it was a really good market,” she said.
As to her team, she said “they fell in my lap — everybody I needed.”
First: Gary Lyons of Daytona Beach, whom she had known for 12 years. He once had his own motorcycle business, then was in the business of building houses and later had ABA Door Service.
“I shut that down when I came to work for Roar,” said the 65-year-old motorcycle designer. “There’s nothing in the Bible about retiring. I’ve worked my whole life. I wake up in the morning and can’t wait to work on motorcycles. They have to make me go home at night.”
Next: Kevin Steinmann of DeLand. “He’s the project manager — a great mechanic — who was in the military building Blackhawk helicopters. He was working for the Volusia County school system on their computers,” Tolleson said. “But he loves motorcycles.”
Then: Tim Heart, the leather man. “He was working for another operator who closed for health reasons right at the time I was looking for someone,” Tolleson said.
She contracts pinstripe artists, air brush artists and hand-art painters for the finish jobs, and the business has two administrative employees.
Tolleson, 54, and her crew also are in the throes of creating an original motorcycle for women, a cosmetic collection for the road and an exclusive fashion line.
“We are developing Wind Blown, a facial-care road kit, body care and makeup good for wind and sun, that can’t melt or shake apart — and things that aren’t bulky,” Tolleson said.
Tolleson’s 36-year-old daughter Leanne Kaplan handles merchandising and displays. And Tolleson’s daughter Tara Romeo, 33, handles customer service.
“They both are helping with our online shopper’s showroom,” Tolleson said.
But guys shouldn’t be intimidated. Roar will do some stuff for men.
“If anybody wants his-and-hers, we will work with them on that,” she said. “But there are so many outlets where men can already buy. I don’t need to work that market.”
~Full text of "Women Hear the ROAR" by Audrey Parente
