Situated in a surprisingly tranquil setting on The Green in Birmingham’s King’s Norton district, Chas Mann Motorcycles has been a fixture of Birmingham’s two-wheeled scene since 1949. Since then it’s enjoyed good times and some lean years, but it’s fair to say that when Chas opened the doors to his showroom he could never have envisaged how the shop would look today. What was once a run-of-the-mill dealership is now, dare I say it, a unique experience. Part showroom, part workshop, part bar and part event space, it’s redefining the whole experience of two-wheeled ownership. At its heart is the new Scooterista brand, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a lot to say here and it’s probably best to start by speaking with the man behind Scooterista, Ian Thompson.
Impulse buy
A lover of all things two-wheeled since childhood, Ian laughs when I looked puzzled, he continued: “I’ve had plenty of jobs and done quite well out of them but nothing really stuck. In 2014 I was working in IT and my daughter had just bought a scooter. For some reason I couldn’t get the showroom that she’d bought it from out of my mind as it had so much unfulfilled potential. In the hope that I may be able to make a few quid, I wrote a business plan for its owners and on the way to try and sell it to them I called into Chas Mann’s for a spark plug. Mark Andrews, who was running the shop after Chas’s son Mike retired, handed it over and said: ‘That’s the last plug I’ll sell’, before going on to tell me he was closing the shop down. I got back in the car and saw the business plan I’d written sitting on the passenger seat. Suddenly things clicked into place, and I thought that if I really believed in the plan, I should do it myself. I went back into the shop and said I wanted to buy the business. My wife, Karen, is wise enough to know when I’ve made a rash purchase and when I got home, she instantly recognised the signs and asked if I’d bought yet another motorcycle. ‘Not exactly,’ I replied….”
