You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio alone there on the highway. All right, I don't even think I can introduce this one. I think this is all yours, buddy.
All right.
So, Matt Chambers is a guy who became famous, or at least well known to me, when he made Confederate motorcycles. They were, you know, big displacement twins cruisers, and at one point he kind of made this really cool pivot to electric bikes and also changed the name to Curtis. And I was following along this whole saga on social media. I just thought it was so cool and the motorcycles
are beautiful. And then one day I was sitting on my couch in Berlin and I saw that they were actually offering shares for sale to the public, not through like a Wall Street IPO, but kind of like a power to the people way to invest.
And you did said.
Yes and clicked in bought shares and Curtis. So now I am full disclosure.
Yes a shareholder, Matthew, come on in and tell us a little bit about the business, and to one of your shareholders into our audience if you will.
Well, that's that's great to hear. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. We spent twenty five years in this what I would call kind of the AMG, aification of Harley wanting to if Harley was the Mercedes and motorcycles, and we would soup them up a little bit. We did a really good job with that. We learned a lot. It was like an apprenticeship and we kind of hit the end of the road in terms of being able to make
a better IC. And on June twenty ninth of twenty sixteen, we made a firm pivot, got rid of everything to do with IC, cleansed our minds, and went one hundred percent into the dream of making the best motorcycle in the world and and it would just happen to be electric, and and we were. We did. We did a lot of work on our own, with our own, with the team we had at the time. Then I got this gentleman JT to come back, who had done a bike. Matt you probably know that bike the Rate. It was
a pretty interesting motorcycle that we conjured it. It was very aircrafty. Then we did the Fighter. It had all this machine stuff going on and it's a very precise, a more precise way to make a bike. And then JT invented this patented idea, this idea of tapping the axle, the shaft through the motor some actually making a motorcycle symmetrical, the dream of an inside out made organic machine. It just all came together. So now it's about two years
later than I thought. But we're very close, Matt, and thank you for being a shareholder. And I believe we're going to do really, really really well. Well.
One thing, I one day I would like to ride one of the bikes, because in so many ways you challenge the norms of you know, the peril twin parallel forks, and the way a swing arm works and the drive shaft as you say, and how does it handle when you get out and ride this bike, or what is the feedback that you get from people who are testing these out?
Matt? If you, if you had the experience of being in the business for a long time like me, one of the things you one of the things that would be troublesome is all of the shunt from the first time I saw one of our bikes, and our bikes were packaged better than than the others. I mean, we we invented our own packaging with with the ice and the V twin, it was better. We turned it into a monocoque. It was a far better way to make
a motorcycle. But man, when you would when you would run that thing on a dino, it was it was shunty and violent. And what we've with JG's invention and the symmetry, the bike is a little more balanced, it's a little more beautiful. But even more importantly, I believe, is it has it. The way you access the power is just so sublime, and it gives the bike a little more fidelity, It gives you more confidence. So the experience of riding it is I believe, the best that
I've ever encountered on a motorcycle. I'm very confident that this is the best motor So.
I'm just going to ask you some business questions. I mean, how much have you how many are you selling, what's the growth rate that you're seeing, and what do they cost?
Well, the bike, the bike is a hyper luxury item and that plays into our deck. We have about thirteen hundred customers and those are pretty much all Ultra hid network, So we and we have enough to break even the first year. I believe it's about twenty five firm, and
we have another one hundred and five to sell. We're thinking really small, so we believe we will ultimately be the most valuable American motorcycle company by say, twenty thirty, more valuable than Live Wire, I mean electric motorcycle company. And the way we're going to do that is by doing by hitting a bogie of fifty million of sales around twenty seven to twenty eight, but bringing in a thirty but a thirty percent even doe fifty percent gross margins.
So we're right now we're hitting about one hundred thousand of net revenue per unit, and our costs will be will be south of fifty thousands. We have a good margin, so it's kind of a Tesla coming at hyper luxury. Our next product will be sixty. We're very comfortable we can hit the thirty thousand dollars cost of good sold on that product in twenty twenty seven. But the first thing is these one hundred and thirty initial customers.
And.
We feel like we've got them already. We do have two thousand qualified expressions of interest along with our deck of owners, numerous of whom have said they will be buying a bike. But as Matt, you probably would agree that the transfer from ice to electric is it's something that an individual has to come up with in his
own time. I worked with a guy named Treblanche for for years, and he pounded me out and he used to just beat me to death about we got to go electric, and I was like, shut up, dude, I hate him. And then then one day a light went off, you know, I finally you know, he was right the whole time. But it's not it's it's funny.
I think you're right. Yeah, it takes I think it takes a long time, but then when it happens, it's like a switch is flipped and then all of a sudden you kind of realize the benefits.
Not to say that.
You, you know, throw away all of your love for the bikes you've ridden in the past. The internal combustion engines, but it's just a whole new experience, and I'm so excited. I'm so happy that you guys are doing this, and I'm so glad we could have had you on.
Matt, thank you so much. We really appreciate it so Ippeciate.
Wait, so just because folks in our control are wondering, so how much does it? Say? How much does one cost? I know you said hyper luxury. You just got about thirty seconds.
It's one hundred and twenty thousand. That's where it starts and it can certainly go up from there. But if you see the bike, Carol, it's worth it's worth it. I say it. It's lovely.
I said to Matt before we get started. I was on your website. They are gorgeous and they are unlike anything else you see when it comes to if you're looking at bikes and.
The engineering is revolutionary and the machining is so precise, it's just that it will last you for all of a turn.
I was asking for our community. Matt, thank you so much. Come back soon. Matt Chambers. He's chief executive Officer, Chairman of the board of Curtis Motorcycle. Ticker is CMOT and he's joining us from Leeds, Alabama via zoom. Carol, Matthew Miller, Matt's got a smile. This is Bloomberg