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White Brothers Ceases Operations
by dean adams
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

In what can only be described as a shocking development, long-time motorcycle industry firm White Brothers, according to the terse outgoing message on their main phone line, ceased being in business yesterday.

The message states that White Brothers will be "ceasing operations immediately".

While a firm which predominantly served the needs of off-road riders, White Brothers was certainly well known to the street-riding sect of the motorcycle industry; their catalog included parts for Supermoto-style street bikes.

To say that White Brothers was an industry powerhouse is an understatement: they were a major sponsor on the factory Yamaha motocross team last year and were also a mid-level motorcycle parts distributor. In addition, their activities in vintage racing and on the vintage scene are also of renown.

There was a time when if you owned a four-stroke off-road motorcycle it probably had a White Brothers exhaust pipe on it--they were ubiquitous in the XT350 and XR350 ranks. Thus, if there was one firm which could seemingly capitalize on the current seismic shift in off-road motorcycles from two-stroke to four-stroke powerplants, conventional wisdom says it should have been White Brothers.

White Brothers was purchased by MAG (Motorsport Action Group) in 2001.

ENDS

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Actually, a common misconception is how big the suspension part of the biz actually was. Ohlins was much bigger. Many people thought we were "White Power Suspension" and later "WP Suspension". They were actually completely different companies and had nothing to do with one another, other than we sold and serviced their forks and shocks. WP was in Holland. Later they changed hands several times and ultimately KTM bought them out.

WB suspension specialized in rebuilding/revalving WP and/or OE suspension. And we did do a lot of that. By far and away, the biggest problem was keeping good suspension techs. It seemed like evey time you'd start getting someone trained to the point of them being really good, or getting the word around that WB had the johnny suspension guru, they'd leave to start their own business and/or go to work for someone else. Definetly was frustrating... Very rarely did we ever do any Ohlins, Fox or Penske.

It's really a long story of the WB trip. The WB of today has almost nothing in common with the WB of yesterday. Up, down and now with V&H. Tom & Dan (White) were our first customers at SuperTrapp for the motorcycle mufflers at Golden Gate Fields (mile dt). They became a distributor for SuperTrapp after that. - The nine years that I was DOO were fantastic for the most part. After leaving in '01, it just started going in a different direction. If anyone can help them come back, it's Terry. I have a lot of respect for him.

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"Think Ohlins but bigger."

man it is hard to think bigger than OHLINS hehehe

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