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Designing a new Mustang Seat are, from left, vice president Gary Kendrick, craftsman Glen Lopes and president Al Simmons.

Connecticut Is Home

To Mustang Seats

  By BUD WILKINSON

Three Rivers, Mass. - The difference between a stock seat on a motorcycle and a custom-made replacement saddle can be the difference between a sore butt and the pain-free end to a long ride. Stock seats are designed by biker makers to help meet a price point when a model hits the showroom floor, while customs are built solely for the rider’s long-term comfort.

It isn’t even necessary to sit on the two to notice the difference. Just put them side-by-side and turn them over. The cover on the stock seat will likely be attached to the seat pan with less expensive staples, while the custom will display rivets that better secure the cover and have less chance of pulling free or damaging the material.

Needless to say, Mustang Motorcycle Products of Terryville, maker of the well-known Mustang Seats, uses rivets. This low profile company, which has its corporate headquarters just south of the Terryville Fairgrounds, has been turning out high-quality seats for Harley-Davidsons and other mass-appeal cruisers for nearly 30 years. 

But don’t show up at the doorstep asking for a tour or looking to buy one. Mustang Seats can only be purchased online at mustangseats.com and through authorized dealers. They aren’t made in Terryville, either, rather at an 88,000-square-foot factory across Connecticut’s northern border in Three Rivers, Mass.

That’s where RIDE-CT went to get a tour. If your mental image of a typical factory is a place that’s gloomy and dirty, smelly and chaotic, and oppressively noisy and cluttered, forget it. Those images are quickly dispelled upon walking the plant that employs nearly 100 skilled workers, some of whom even work in labs coats.

Mustang’s operation is well illuminated, clean and incredibly organized. Works areas and tasks are well defined, and a gleaming wood floor in the product development area confirms the company’s devotion to organization and to quality in crafting its custom seats that are “Proudly made in the USA.”

“The heart of our seat is the foam,” explained vice president Gary Kendrick, who oversees seat development. That may be so, but before there can be foam, a seat pan must be designed to properly fit the frame of the particular make and model, but also properly mold to the backside of the buyer.

“When we build a seat, we start from the base plate and work up,” explained president Al Simmons, who founded Mustang in 1980. He was talking about the design process, yet he could have been referring to actual assembly line construction. It’s a fascinating process that begins at the back of the building with the formation of the seat pan.

Seats pans are made from both fiberglass and steel. Fiberglass pans are used in approximately 60 percent of the seats and begin with resin. One-inch slivers of “chop” are sprayed on to a form. Once dried and hardened, the pan is knocked from the form, trimmed of excess material and then shaped further on a grinding wheel. Steel pans are stamped and likewise cleaned up and then powder-coated.

Hours of design work precede this initial stage, though. “We make a base plate that fits you first, then we make it to fit the bike. Before we put the pan on the bike, we sit on the pan,” said Kendrick.

He wasn’t kidding. Prior to being interviewed, Kendrick and Simmons were in the product development shop overseeing the design of a seat pan for an upcoming model. They examined a prototype pan, placed it on a bike a frame and nestled their butts on it, periodically having designer Glen Lopes shave areas that needed improvement.

“We can’t deal in generalities. It has to be very precise,” said Simmons, noting that a 1/18^th of an inch difference in shape can make a huge difference in comfort.  Other factors such as foot peg location, the angle that the seat sits on a bike, seat height, the location of the handlebars and even frame width come into play in seat design. “You can’t put a wide seat on a narrow frame,” he said.

Once the seat pan is designed and crafted, the next step is making a matching foam cushion. Molds are filled with a liquid chemical mixture that expands as it dries and becomes the foam cushion. Drying can take a couple of hours. The excess then gets trimmed and the foam cushion gets matched with the proper pan and covered.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is gel,” said Simmons, addressing a type of seat that other companies make. “This misconception is that you add gel to anything it makes it more comfortable. That’s not true. Gel is not compressible.”

There are only three primary components to a motorcycle seat – the seat pan, the cushion and the cover, which gets fitted over the foam and riveted to the seat pan. Mustang makes approximately 100,000 seats a year. “That’s a lot of seats, a lot of happy customers,” said Kendrick.

Mustang has six basic seat designs but has modified them to offer 500 seat variations for motorcycles made by Harley-Davidson, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Victory and Yamaha. Seat prices range from $200 to more than $700.

Just because a design has been completed and a specific seat has been on the market doesn’t mean that it won’t be tweaked. “Once it’s done, it isn’t forgotten. We still look for little ways of improving it,” said Kendrick.

Added Simmons, “Customers have helped us correct some of our design flaws. We’ve learned a lot from customer input. Our theories of comfort have come from customer input.”

Unlike so many other companies that have outsourced production to other countries to save money, Mustang hasn’t. “We’ve got better control of the product. I like having control. I’m a control freak,” said Kendrick.

That control is evident in the smooth production process, in the cleanliness of the operation and, in talking with employees, the pleasure that they get in turning out a quality product. Kendrick acknowledged that this lack of disarray and dirt often surprises visitors. “It’s a very neat and very organized factory,” he said.

That means that when each seat that comes down the conveyor for bagging and packaging at the end of the assembly line it will be in spotless condition.

For 2009, Mustang is expanding its product offerings to include hard saddlebags. “People have asked us for a long time for saddlebags that match our seats,” said Simmons. “We’ll be getting into more models of motorcycles and more upholstered products,” such as tank bibs.

Despite the bad economy, Mustang reports that its recent sales are on a par with last year, suggesting riders are holding on to their bikes and investing in them rather than trading them in. Not a bad idea. As Mustang’s slogan suggests, “What a Difference Comfort Makes!”

(Originally published March 7, 2009 in The Republican-American) 

  Vanson Leathers large showroom in Fall River, Mass.

Quality Riding Apparel

Made By Vanson Leathers

By BUD WILKINSON 

Fall River, Mass. – Five years ago, Kevin Nixon was driving a rural postal route, going from mailbox to mailbox as a carrier in Middlebury and Watertown, when he got the urge to break away from the monotony. He moved to Newport, R.I. in June 2003 and soon visited his brother, Blair, who then worked for the high-end motorcycle apparel maker Vanson Leathers.

Within days, Nixon had a job there as well overseeing the company’s web site. The 38-year-old Naugatuck native and 1987 graduate of Sacred Heart High School in Waterbury now holds the title of art director at Vanson Leathers. He works at a computer inside a 19^th Century granite factory building in this mill town and designs the rugged riding gear that gets sold around the world.

“Every day is a new challenge. Every day I make a new product,” said Nixon. “It’s a tough, fast-paced job. It’s not all glamour.”

It just looks that way, because just footsteps away from his work area is the company’s dazzling, 5,000-square-foot, first-floor showroom, packed with racks filled with exquisitely stitched gear adorned with Vanson Leathers’ familiar oval logo and punctuated by both antique and modern-day motorcycles.

John Travolta wore a Vanson Leathers jacket in the motion picture “Wild Hogs.” Tom Cruise had one covered with logos in the stockcar movie “Days of Thunder” and Will Ferrell wore one in the more recent stockcar flick “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Hugh Laurie even wears a Vanson Leathers jacket on the hit TV series “House.”

Nixon has three hanging in his closet as well having taken up motorcycling after joining the company. “I grew up in a home where a motorcycle was called a ‘murdercycle,’” he recalled. He now owns four motorcycles – a Honda CL175, a Honda CB200, a Yamaha FZ1 and a Kawasaki EX500 – and participates each June in the “Lake Erie Loop,” a 650-mile, one-day charity race in the U.S. and Canada for bikes up to 225cc. Last year, he finished in second place, completing the circuit in 11 hours and 27 minutes.

Nixon took RIDE-CT on a different kind of loop last month, a tour of the Vanson Leathers plant. While the first floor is devoted the showroom and office space, it is on the fifth floor where the garments are actually made. The process mixes the hands-on skills of some 50 workers with state of the art technology.

“It’s a bit of a magical science. Knowing how to match two (leather) panels takes time,” Nixon explained. “You have to worry about the imperfections of the leather (and) the texture.”

Some of Vanson Leathers’ employees have been expertly sewing for 30-plus years, and the result of their efforts is a highly durable, long-lasting product. “That’s a problem. We make them too well. We regularly get 25-, 30-year-old jackets to repair,” said Nixon, reporting that Vanson Leathers uses “some of the thickest, toughest hides in the industry,” imported from Brazil.

To demonstrate the quality of Vanson Leathers garments, hanging on the wall in the showroom is a racing suit that has survived 67 crashes. 

Just like the motorcycles that its customers ride, each Vanson Leathers jacket comes with a serial number, along with a matching serialized leather key fob. If the jacket’s stolen and the thief foolishly sends it back to the company for repair, the company will know it and can return it to its rightful owner.

Vanson Leathers jackets aren’t cheap. Some models cost as much as $900. Roughly half of the jackets that Vanson Leathers makes are for rack sales with the other half being custom orders. Nixon reported that it takes six to eight hours to construct a jacket, with a custom order taking six to eight weeks to get out.

This is the busy time of the year – January through April – as riders and motorcycle racers look ahead to the coming riding season. Determining how many different jacket designs Vanson Leathers offers isn’t possible. “That’s very hard to say because anything we’ve ever made we can do,” said Nixon, guessing the total number of patterns may be in the vicinity of 200,000.

Like many American companies, Vanson Leathers faces increased competition from overseas manufacturers that are capable of making and selling goods for much less. Nixon volunteered that the company once employed more than 150 workers and is now in the process of emerging from bankruptcy caused partially by imports from low-wage countries.

Another contributing factor, according to a column in the Providence Journal last summer, was sagging European sales that company executives tied to the plummeting popularity of the U.S. as a result of the Iraq war and the conduct of troops.

The column quoted Vanson Leathers owner Mike Vanderseesen as saying, “Every time you saw a picture of Abu Ghraib (prison), our sales dropped… America has always been a place that stood for something good. That’s been hugely damaged.”

Vanson Leathers can’t dictate U.S. policy, but it can go after the competition, and it’s now planning to establish a manufacturing operation in Costa Rica for a new line of lesser-priced, entry-level gear.

“It’s going to be the same leather. It’s going to be the same materials,” said Nixon, emphasizing that the company’s more expensive apparel will continue to be made in Fall River. “We aren’t shutting any of this down. This isn’t going away.”

In touring the factory operation, despite seeing many empty work stations, what struck me was the pride and spirit exhibited by those who still work for Vanson Leathers, and their absolute attention to detail. The company’s “Made in U.S.A.” reputation depends on quality, and the skilled employees deliver.

“We could send out things that nobody would ever see a problem with, but we’d know,” said Nixon, who also demonstrates great pride in his employer and in the specific products that he creates. “I enjoy the sense of accomplishment when I see what I made,” he said.

Vanson Leathers can be found online at vansonleathers.com and Nixon said that tours are always possible for anyone visiting the showroom. 

Vanson Leathers factory in Fall River, Mass.

(Originally published February 9, 2008 in The Republican-American.)