Scottsdale motorcycle maker branches out

Tucked inside an unassuming office complex in the Scottsdale Airpark is an offbeat motorcycle maker with an offbeat name.

You may not have heard of Sucker Punch Sally’s custom bikes, but that would only mean you are not a motorcycle aficionado.

The Scottsdale workshop will turn out about 500 built-to-suit motorcycles this year, said Christian Clayton, Sucker Punch Sally’s president.

And that makes the little local company one of the country’s top three custom bike manufacturers, he said.

And possibly the fastest growing both in bobbers — that’s stripped-down motorcycles, for those not familiar with the jargon — and in related gear like wheels and other parts and accessories. The company even hawks its own duds and suds.

In the three years since Sucker Punch Sally’s moved into its new Scottsdale digs, it grew from producing 20 bikes a year to 500, Clayton said.

Now it has expanded its clothing line. Amy Clayton, Christian’s wife, handles clothing sales. She sells 30 to 40 T-shirts a day online, and gets 15 to 20 requests a month to send shirts to Iraq or Afghanistan, she said.

And in a couple of weeks, at the annual Sturgis, S.D., rally, an annual pilgrimage for motorcycle enthusiasts, Sucker Punch Sally’s will introduce a beverage line.

The company is starting with an energy drink and moonshine, Clayton said. There’s hardly a better combo for the motorcycle crowd, he said.

And there’s Sucker Punch Sally’s pale ale and stout, too.

Look for a new beverage line, including flavored moonshine — lemonade, cranberry, sweet tea and jungle juice — to debut in October, he said.

After Sturgis, Clayton plans to test-market the new drinks in Arizona and Florida.

The bikes are the focus of the business — a business that Clayton, a longtime motorcycle enthusiast, sort of fell into.

He and a couple of friends started building custom bikes in 2002 in a three-car garage in Ohio. One of the partners had a T-shirt line of which Sucker Punch Sally’s Old-School Choppers was the most popular logo. When the men built a few custom bikes and the partner was asked what the motorcycle company was called, he blurted out the odd moniker, Clayton said. And it stuck. “People never forget the name,” he said.

Ohio weather wasn’t conducive to year-round riding, so Clayton moved the bike-building business to Scottsdale in 2005, and his wife, Amy, took over the clothing sales.

The company caters to the military and to “average working man” bike lovers who don’t have a lot of money for the super-pricey customs, Clayton said.

The basic Sucker Punch Sally’s bobber, which has won several industry awards, costs about $20,000, and that includes the custom paint job, no matter how intricate the image, he said.

Customers can add on fancier leather seats or bigger engines, Clayton said, “But it won’t be the paint job that makes it cost more.”

Since everything from the parts used to the assembly to the paint job is hand-crafted to customer specifications, every Sucker Punch Sally’s creation looks different, but Clayton sums up the character of the bikes as, “modern technology with ’50s flair.”

Except for the motors and transmissions, Sucker Punch Sally’s makes all its own parts or accessories or designs them and has them made to its specifications, Clayton said. Sucker Punch Sally’s crew of 30, who often spend late nights gulping energy drinks to meet deadlines, helped create the “orange Creamsicle” flavor for their own brand, Clayton said.