BikeBandit

» see bikebandit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ken Wahlster started BikeBandit out of his house in San Diego in 1999, selling motorcycle parts into a market that had always run on printed microfiche at a dealership counter. It worked. The company moved into a warehouse in Spring Valley and later into a 107,000 square foot facility, and at its best was shipping around ten thousand items a day to customers in 27 countries with roughly 700,000 of them on the books. Revenue got to about $65 million with more than a hundred people on the payroll, and the company made the Internet Retailer Top 500 list every year from 2007 to 2014.

I have never owned a motorcycle, so this shop was never aimed at me. The interesting thing from outside is the catalog: OEM fiche, the exploded diagrams where every bolt in an assembly has a callout number, turned into something you could click. Dealers had those diagrams on paper and read them for you, slowly. Putting them on a public website made the part number a thing the owner held rather than the counter.

The company changed hands three times in four years. Wahlster sold the majority in 2013 and the rest went to Affinity Development Group in 2015, which sold it on in 2017 to Vey's Bandit LLC, owned in turn by a powersports dealer group. Revenue was $23 million in 2020 and $7.7 million the year after. On 7 February 2022 Vey's Bandit filed Chapter 7 in the Southern District of California, case 22-00294-CL7.

~ what the trustee found ~

The dates in the filing do not line up with the dates on the website. Operations staff were terminated from late November 2021 and most of the administrative staff in early December, so by the time of the petition there had been nobody to pick an order for two months. The trustee's account says the company kept taking online orders and charging cards until days or weeks before the filing.

The figure the trustee put on that is $646,000: money collected from customers for orders the company could not fulfill and did not refund, with "possibly thousands" of consumers among the creditors. Sales tax was collected on those orders too and never remitted. The English Wikipedia article says $670,000 in its own text while citing the reporting that says $646,000, so take the smaller one, which is the sourced figure.

The petition lists assets of $705,300, of which $632 was actual money in a bank account, against liabilities above $19 million. Inventory was claimed at $3.1 million with a liquidation value estimated at $400,000. Unpaid 2021 taxes came to $533,504 spread across 36 states.

~ $632 ~

Most of the $19 million is owed to a very short list of people. The largest single line is $10 million to an individual, and below that sit $1.9 million to the dealer group that owned the company and $2.9 million to an entity whose name was amended on 14 March to the firm that had sold the business in 2017. Jalopnik's reading of the filing is that roughly $11.9 million of the total is money the company owed to itself. The $590,000 owed to Google is the only line in the whole list that looks like a normal trade debt for an internet retailer.

The site itself stayed up long after the people had gone. You could fill a cart and pay a defunct company until the middle of April 2022, two months past the petition. A lookup for bikebandit.com today comes back with no address at all. Everything else about this wind-down was left half-finished.

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