Crafting attainable, small-capacity bikes shot through with an eye for details and a love for motorcycling culture, Mutt Motorcycles are helping keep the Midlands’ long tradition of bike-building alive. This is their story, as told by their founders.
“The reason it’s called a Mutt is that it’s a mongrel. It’s loads of different breeds, all mixed up.” Will Rigg is refreshingly candid about the origins of Mutt Motorcycles, the brand he co-founded with business partner Benny Thomas over 15 years ago with a view to creating affordable, accessible small CC motorcycles shot through with influences from the achingly cool world of custom bike building.
That name reflects the ethos behind the first Mutt, which now sits, proudly patinated, on a mezzanine level of the firm’s signature showroom/outlet/coffee shop/production facility in suburban Birmingham. The bike that started it all was hand built by Benny, an experienced custom bike builder with roots working on big-engined choppers. Using the bulletproof innards of a Suzuki GN as its base, it was an experiment with applying that custom ethos to something smaller and more accessible.
Things have changed a little since then as the brand’s ramped up and production numbers have approached five figures per year, but this doesn’t mean Mutt’s abandoned its roots. “I found [Benny’s] bikes by following his blog,” explains Will, “and assumed he was in America, because everybody was. One day there was a photo of him with one of his bikes in front of a sign with a Bromsgrove phone number on it.” Benny’s thick Midlands accent was confirmation that yes, these custom bikes were being created a few miles down the road from Will.
“We stared knocking about together and Benny built me a few bikes,” Will continues. “I worked in the brand and fashion industry [at the time], and was just into bikes. There seemed to be a bit of a renaissance in biking, particularly around the custom scene.”
This was where Mutt began, and they’ve been intertwined with Britain’s second city ever since. Their exponential growth led them to leave their previous premises in the ever-cool Digbeth area of the city a couple of years ago, but moving into a big out-of-town industrial unit clearly wouldn’t be the Mutt way.
Instead, they’ve taken on a vast building in the suburb of Kings Norton that started life as a Victorian paper mill and was extended in the 1970s, lacing it with a fascinating medley of architectural features that mirrors the various influences behind Mutt’s bikes.
“I just like all kinds of motorcycles, generally old ones,” says Benny. “I feel that vehicle design lost its way a bit, and to me lots of stuff just looks very much the same now. What I like from the heyday of design is that everything from Chevys with big tailfins to Harleys to Triumphs all had a very, very particular look. That’s when people were really experimenting and doing cool stuff, but it was also really functional. My inspiration – Mutt’s inspiration – comes from vehicle design when it was at its best.”
“To give you an idea of his influences,” adds Will, “Benny doesn’t have any modern vehicles. He rides bikes every day, and his most modern bike is from 1990, and made to look a bit older. He’s got one car – it’s a Type 35 Bugatti.”
The joy of Mutt’s bikes is that they take these stylistic influences and put modern, dependable and affordable mechanicals underneath them. It’s a similar vibe to the scores of restomods we’re seeing in the car world, but these are brand-new vehicles with ground-up designs. There’s no one sub-genre of bike they belong to – look closely and there’s bits of chopper, café racer, scrambler, and more. Visually, they’re representations of Will and Benny’s love for two wheels, distilled into a super-simple and effective retro package.
Underneath, Mutt has continued to use always-dependable Suzuki engines from day one, and they exclusively offer 125 and 250cc bikes. This in turn means that not a single bike in their expansive current range breaches the £5,000 mark in terms of base price. Though even the 250cc bikes produce just 17hp, these are lightweight, pared-back machines, and the bigger-engined machines will still take you up to the motorway speed limit, should you ever need to get there on something fundamentally designed as a stylish daily runabout or something to buzz around back lanes on during sunny weekends.
This is something Will and Benny are passionate about: “A lot of [our customers] have maybe got something beautiful and a bit rare and valuable, and they don’t want to just be nipping down the shops on it,” says Will. “They want a cool everyday fling-around.”
“There was a stage when people had the lower CC stuff as just cheap modes of transport,” continues Benny, “but now it’s come back to being cool. They’re not just using them because they’re fuel efficient, they’re using them because they’re good fun.”
Tapping into this niche of affordable, high-quality, and ultra-stylish small-capacity bikes has also allowed Mutt to tap into a diverse and globally displaced customer base. “It can be quite intimidating [to get into biking],” says Will. “If you love the idea of it but you’ve never ridden a bike before, you’ve got to get through your full test, you’ve then got probably a mountain of insurance payments to insure anything big as a new rider… it’s quite prohibitive and quite daunting. The idea with these is to get on the road, simply – you can do your CBT on a Saturday morning and be on the road in the afternoon.
“We get a lot of first-time riders, we get a lot of older folk returning to it because they’re easy to own with all the mod cons. We get a high percentage of women for a bike brand – somewhere between 20 and 25% of our customers, we reckon.”
There’s a global scene that’s sprung up around this Birmingham brand, with distributors everywhere from London to Macau and Paris to Brisbane, and Will and Benny are hugely encouraging of customers who want to modify their bikes. “Everyone’s got their own little way of doing stuff, with different styles in different countries,” says Benny.
While Benny spearheads the technical and design elements of the bikes, Will’s used his background to build up a brand around them. There aren’t many manufacturers producing vehicles in these numbers whose headquarters you can drop into to pick up a coffee and a T-shirt, but this level of accessibility is core to what Mutt do.
Simple, retro-styled vehicles, especially those made in Britain, seem to be having a bit of a moment as mainstream machinery becomes more complex and homogenous and enthusiasts seek out more elemental pleasures. We’ve seen it on four wheels with Caterham, on three with Morgan, and Mutt exemplify it in two-wheeled form.
If you want to see for yourself what it’s all about, the team from Mutt are joining us for the evening of 31 May for Ride, our evenings’ celebration of the kind of joy only two wheels can bring. Tickets are available now.
