We first met Ellis Pitt just before Christmas in 2008. Well spoken and
immaculately groomed, on first appearance he didn’t strike me as a
‘biker’. It quickly became apparent that he had a chilld-like enthusiasm
for all things 2-wheeled which struck a chord- we were going to get
along.
Ellis had an aspiration to build a custom, but wasn’t into ‘Chrome
dildos’ as he put it. The only starting point was a Buell Blast engine
and a series of images that Ellis had amassed of various bobbers, cafe
racers and small capacity Italian bikes seen on the Motogiro.
We set about sketching up a few ideas of what his bike could be. We
did too well. A one off turned into a range of 4 bikes sharing a
platform that could be built to order. A series of renderings, a website
and press release later and Mac was born.
Cue a wave of press the likes of which I have never experienced in
the bike market. Within two weeks Mac had been on pretty much every well
known bike magazine or blog site in the Western world and was worming
it’s way into the mainstream press. Even GQ, Mens Health and Playboy
have featured the Mac bikes, which at that point existed only in a PSD
file. The Mac site killed our web hosting account, doing a months bandwidth
in 5 days and taking 4000 emails in the first month. This was getting
serious.
Just over a year later, we're pleased to report 'Spud' is under
construction under the watchful eyes of Steve and Lester Harris, watch
this space!
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